Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy on Lie Groups: Theory and…

The problem of learning functions over spaces of probabilities - or distribution regression - is gaining significant interest in the machine learning community. A key challenge behind this problem is to identify a suitable representation…

Modern large-scale kernel-based tests such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) optimize kernel hyperparameters on a held-out sample via data splitting to obtain the most powerful test statistics. While…

We propose a novel supervised learning method to optimize the kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy generative adversarial networks (MMD GANs), and the kernel support vector machines (SVMs). Specifically, we characterize a distributionally…

Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is a cornerstone of nonparametric statistics, yet it remains sensitive to bandwidth choice, boundary bias, and computational inefficiency. This study revisits KDE through a principled convolutional framework,…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic sampling algorithm that iteratively transports a set of particles to approximate given distributions, based on an efficient gradient-based update that guarantees to optimally…

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…

Computable Stein discrepancies have been deployed for a variety of applications, ranging from sampler selection in posterior inference to approximate Bayesian inference to goodness-of-fit testing. Existing convergence-determining Stein…

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…

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…

We propose a novel distributed inference algorithm for continuous graphical models, by extending Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to leverage the Markov dependency structure of the distribution of interest. Our approach combines…

Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…

Many interesting machine learning problems are best posed by considering instances that are distributions, or sample sets drawn from distributions. Previous work devoted to machine learning tasks with distributional inputs has done so…

Bias evaluation is fundamental to trustworthy AI, both in terms of checking data quality and in terms of checking the outputs of AI systems. In testing data quality, for example, one may study the distance of a given dataset, viewed as a…

Particle-based approximate Bayesian inference approaches such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combine the flexibility and convergence guarantees of sampling methods with the computational benefits of variational inference. In…

We propose a novel method for measuring the discrepancy between a set of samples and a desired posterior distribution for Bayesian inference. Classical methods for assessing sample quality like the effective sample size are not appropriate…

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…

Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) is among the most popular goodness-of-fit (GoF) measures on general domains with a large number of successful deployments. One of the main applications of KSD is in constructing powerful GoF tests. However,…

Uncertainty evaluation is critical in scientific and engineering inverse problems. However, existing benchmarks on Diffusion Inverse Solvers (DIS) primarily focus on reconstruction accuracy but overlook uncertainty and distributional…

Sliced Stein discrepancy (SSD) and its kernelized variants have demonstrated promising successes in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning in high dimensions. Despite their theoretical elegance, their empirical performance depends…

Despite their advantages, normalizing flows generally suffer from several shortcomings including their tendency to generate unrealistic data (e.g., images) and their failing to detect out-of-distribution data. One reason for these…