Related papers: Particle-based Variational Inference with Precondi…
Gradient regularization (GR) is a method that penalizes the gradient norm of the training loss during training. While some studies have reported that GR can improve generalization performance, little attention has been paid to it from the…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a non-parametric inference algorithm that evolves a set of particles to fit a given distribution of interest. We analyze the non-asymptotic properties of SVGD, showing that there exists a set of…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms…
While methods exist for aligning flow matching models--a popular and effective class of generative models--with human preferences, existing approaches fail to achieve both adaptation efficiency and probabilistically sound prior…
A new variational inference method, SPH-ParVI, based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant) or sampling using gradients. SPH-ParVI simulates the flow of a fluid…
Variational inference transforms posterior inference into parametric optimization thereby enabling the use of latent variable models where otherwise impractical. However, variational inference can be finicky when different variational…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…
We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient…
We propose a new class of convex penalty functions, called \emph{variational Gram functions} (VGFs), that can promote pairwise relations, such as orthogonality, among a set of vectors in a vector space. These functions can serve as…
We present a novel particle flow for sampling called kernel variational inference flow (KVIF). KVIF do not require the explicit formula of the target distribution which is usually unknown in filtering problem. Therefore, it can be applied…
Ensembles of deep neural networks have achieved great success recently, but they do not offer a proper Bayesian justification. Moreover, while they allow for averaging of predictions over several hypotheses, they do not provide any…
Bayesian neural networks (BNN) promise to combine the predictive performance of neural networks with principled uncertainty modeling important for safety-critical systems and decision making. However, posterior uncertainty estimates depend…
Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…
We introduce a functional gradient descent trajectory optimization algorithm for robot motion planning in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHSs). Functional gradient algorithms are a popular choice for motion planning in complex…
Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be…
Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…
A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…
We investigate stochastic Bregman proximal gradient (SBPG) methods for minimizing a finite-sum nonconvex function $\Psi(x):=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(x)+\phi(x)$, where $\phi$ is convex and nonsmooth, while $f_i$, instead of gradient…
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) unifies object localization and visual relationship reasoning by predicting boxes and subject-predicate-object triples. Yet most pipelines treat SGG as a one-shot, deterministic classification problem rather…
The recently developed Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods drive the empirical distribution of a set of \emph{fixed-weight} particles towards a given target distribution $\pi$ by iteratively updating particles' positions.…