Related papers: On Representations of Mean-Field Variational Infer…

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Approximating a probability distribution using a set of particles is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics, with applications including clustering and quantization. Formally, we seek a weighted mixture of Dirac measures…

While generalized linear mixed models are a fundamental tool in applied statistics, many specifications, such as those involving categorical factors with many levels or interaction terms, can be computationally challenging to estimate due…

It is known that the Langevin dynamics used in MCMC is the gradient flow of the KL divergence on the Wasserstein space, which helps convergence analysis and inspires recent particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs). But no more…

Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Bayesian models provide a framework for probabilistic modelling of complex datasets. However, many of such models are computationally demanding especially in the presence of large datasets. On the other hand, in sensor network applications,…

Fairness concerns are increasingly critical as machine learning models are deployed in high-stakes applications. While existing fairness-aware methods typically intervene at the model level, they often suffer from high computational costs,…

Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model…

For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

We study the machine learning task for models with operators mapping between the Wasserstein space of probability measures and a space of functions, like e.g. in mean-field games/control problems. Two classes of neural networks, based on…

We present a novel approach to approximate Gaussian and mixture-of-Gaussians filtering. Our method relies on a variational approximation via a gradient-flow representation. The gradient flow is derived from a Kullback--Leibler discrepancy…

This paper proposes a non-centered parameterization based infinite-dimensional mean-field variational inference (NCP-iMFVI) approach for solving the hierarchical Bayesian inverse problems. This method can generate available estimates from…

In this paper, we investigate gradient estimate of the Poisson equation and the exponential convergence in the Wasserstein metric $W_{1,d_{l^1}}$, uniform in the number of particles, and uniform-in-time propagation of chaos for the…

Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Non-linear hierarchical models are commonly used in many disciplines. However, inference in the presence of non-nested effects and on large datasets is challenging and computationally burdensome. This paper provides two contributions to…

We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…