Related papers: Second order stochastic gradient update for Choles…
The numerical evaluation of statistics plays a crucial role in statistical physics and its applied fields. It is possible to evaluate the statistics for a stochastic differential equation with Gaussian white noise via the corresponding…
We derive and analyze new diffusion approximations of stationary distributions of Markov chains that are based on second- and higher-order terms in the expansion of the Markov chain generator. Our approximations achieve a higher degree of…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
We consider a higher-order Milstein scheme for stochastic partial differential equations with trace class noise which fulfill a certain commutativity condition. A novel technique to generally improve the order of convergence of Taylor…
Uncertainty estimation in large deep-learning models is a computationally challenging task, where it is difficult to form even a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution. In such situations, existing methods usually resort to a…
We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of…
In this paper, we consider static parameter estimation for a class of continuous-time state-space models. Our goal is to obtain an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-likelihood (score function), which is an estimate that is…
This paper concerns the analysis of random second order linear differential equations. Usually, solving these equations consists of computing the first statistics of the response process, and that task has been an essential goal in the…
Geostatistics represents one of the most challenging classes of scientific applications due to the desire to incorporate an ever increasing number of geospatial locations to accurately model and predict environmental phenomena. For example,…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
Estimation of the covariance matrix for high-dimensional multivariate datasets is a challenging and important problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we focus on high-dimensional Gaussian DAG models where sparsity is induced on the…
Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…
We propose a new algorithm for efficiently solving the damped Fisher matrix in large-scale scenarios where the number of parameters significantly exceeds the number of available samples. This problem is fundamental for natural gradient…
The state-space model and the Kalman filter provide us with unified and computationaly efficient procedure for computing the log-likelihood of the diverse type of time series models. This paper presents an algorithm for computing the…
In this paper we present a novel quasi-Newton algorithm for use in stochastic optimisation. Quasi-Newton methods have had an enormous impact on deterministic optimisation problems because they afford rapid convergence and computationally…
Traditional preamble detection algorithms have low accuracy in the grant-based random access scheme in massive machine-type communication (mMTC). We present a novel preamble detection algorithm based on Stein variational gradient descent…
Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
In this paper an approach for finding a sparse incomplete Cholesky factor through an incomplete orthogonal factorization with Givens rotations is discussed and applied to Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs). The incomplete Cholesky factor…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…