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We propose an approach based on function evaluations and Bayesian inference to extract higher-order differential information of objective functions {from a given ensemble of particles}. Pointwise evaluation $\{V(x^i)\}_i$ of some potential…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…
Multilevel Stein variational gradient descent is a method for particle-based variational inference that leverages hierarchies of surrogate target distributions with varying costs and fidelity to computationally speed up inference. The…
Gradient matching is a promising tool for learning parameters and state dynamics of ordinary differential equations. It is a grid free inference approach, which, for fully observable systems is at times competitive with numerical…
Stochastic gradient descent algorithms for training linear and kernel predictors are gaining more and more importance, thanks to their scalability. While various methods have been proposed to speed up their convergence, the model selection…
To accurately reproduce measurements from the real world, simulators need to have an adequate model of the physical system and require the parameters of the model be identified. We address the latter problem of estimating parameters through…
We present a new algorithm for approximate inference in probabilistic programs, based on a stochastic gradient for variational programs. This method is efficient without restrictions on the probabilistic program; it is particularly…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) use nonparametric variational families represented by particles to approximate the target distribution according to the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Online optimization has gained increasing interest due to its capability of tracking real-world streaming data. Although online optimization methods have been widely studied in the setting of frequentist statistics, few works have…
Bayesian experimental design (BED) is to answer the question that how to choose designs that maximize the information gathering. For implicit models, where the likelihood is intractable but sampling is possible, conventional BED methods…
Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…
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…
We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output…
Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…
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…
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…
We propose a fast and scalable variational method for Bayesian inference in high-dimensional parameter space, which we call projected Stein variational Newton (pSVN) method. We exploit the intrinsic low-dimensional geometric structure of…