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Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Lukang Sun , Peter Richtárik

A stagewise decomposition algorithm called value function gradient learning (VFGL) is proposed for large-scale multistage stochastic convex programs. VFGL finds the parameter values that best fit the gradient of the value function within a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-06 Jinkyu Lee , Sanghyeon Bae , Woo Chang Kim , Yongjae Lee

The particle-flow (PF) algorithm is used in general-purpose particle detectors to reconstruct a comprehensive particle-level view of the collision by combining information from different subdetectors. A graph neural network (GNN) model,…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2021-11-29 Farouk Mokhtar , Raghav Kansal , Daniel Diaz , Javier Duarte , Joosep Pata , Maurizio Pierini , Jean-Roch Vlimant

Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for model-based reinforcement learning, enabling high sample efficiency by backpropagating gradients through differentiable dynamics. However, prior RPG approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hai Zhong , Zhuoran Li , Xun Wang , Longbo Huang

Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-29 Thang D. Bui , Cuong V. Nguyen , Siddharth Swaroop , Richard E. Turner

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-31 Gianluca Detommaso , Tiangang Cui , Alessio Spantini , Youssef Marzouk , Robert Scheichl

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based particle method for sampling from a target distribution, e.g., in generative modeling and Bayesian inference. SVGD does not require estimating the gradient of the log-density,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-10 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-02 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

A reward-guided, gradient-free ParVI method, \textit{R-ParVI}, is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant). R-ParVI formulates the sampling problem as particle flow driven by rewards: particles are drawn from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yongchao Huang

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

(Neal and Hinton, 1998) recast maximum likelihood estimation of any given latent variable model as the minimization of a free energy functional $F$, and the EM algorithm as coordinate descent applied to $F$. Here, we explore alternative…

Computation · Statistics 2023-02-21 Juan Kuntz , Jen Ning Lim , Adam M. Johansen

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-11 Jingwei Zhuo , Chang Liu , Jiaxin Shi , Jun Zhu , Ning Chen , Bo Zhang

In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-03 Jose L. Varona-Santana , Marcos A. Capistrán

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

In the present article, novel Coarse-Graining (CG) algorithms for the Eulerian-Lagrangian (EL) simulation of particle-laden flows are proposed. These include different variants of Reproducing Kernel Particle Methods (RKPM) and an extended…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-11-12 H. Eshraghi , E. Amani , M. Saffar-Avval

Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Sebastian Reich , Andrew M Stuart

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-26 Jun Han , Qiang Liu

One of the most popular approaches for solving total variation-regularized optimization problems in the space of measures are Particle Gradient Flows (PGFs). These restrict the problem to linear combinations of Dirac deltas and then perform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Christian Amend , Marcello Carioni , Konstantinos Zemas

Sampling a probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational science and engineering. This task may be cast as an optimization problem over all probability measures, and an initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Sebastian Reich , Andrew M. Stuart

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-16 Jen Ning Lim , Adam M. Johansen