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Related papers: Sampling via Gradient Flows in the Space of Probab…

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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…

Computation · Statistics 2023-06-21 Adrien Corenflos , Hany Abdulsamad

The dynamics of probability density functions have been extensively studied in computational science and engineering to understand physical phenomena and facilitate algorithmic design. Of particular interest are dynamics formulated as…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-03-16 José A. Carrillo , Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Jiaoyang Huang , Dongyi Wei

Accurate and efficient prediction of multi-scale flows remains a formidable challenge. Constructing theoretical models and numerical methods often involves the design and optimization of parameters. While gradient descent methods have been…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-02-10 Tianbai Xiao

Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

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)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-24 Shiyue Zhang , Ziheng Cheng , Cheng Zhang

A new approach of obtaining stratified random samples from statistically dependent random variables is described. The proposed method can be used to obtain samples from the input space of a computer forward model in estimating expectations…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-25 Anirban Mondal , Abhijit Mandal

We discuss several algorithms for sampling from unnormalized probability distributions in statistical physics, but using the language of statistics and machine learning. We provide a self-contained introduction to some key ideas and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-05 Michael F. Faulkner , Samuel Livingstone

Despite the widespread use of gradient-based algorithms for optimizing high-dimensional non-convex functions, understanding their ability of finding good minima instead of being trapped in spurious ones remains to a large extent an open…

Sampling from nonsmooth target probability distributions is essential in various applications, including the Bayesian Lasso. We propose a splitting-based sampling algorithm for the time-implicit discretization of the probability flow for…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-14 Fuqun Han , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

We propose a variational form of the BDF2 method as an alternative to the commonly used minimizing movement scheme for the time-discrete approximation of gradient flows in abstract metric spaces. Assuming uniform semi-convexity --- but no…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2017-12-25 Daniel Matthes , Simon Plazotta

Sampling from high-dimensional distributions is a fundamental problem in statistical research and practice. However, great challenges emerge when the target density function is unnormalized and contains isolated modes. We tackle this…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-11 Yixuan Qiu , Xiao Wang

Recent years witnessed the development of powerful generative models based on flows, diffusion or autoregressive neural networks, achieving remarkable success in generating data from examples with applications in a broad range of areas. A…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-07-22 Davide Ghio , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Sampling from unnormalized densities is analogous to the generative modeling problem, but the target distribution is defined by a known energy function instead of data samples. Because evaluating the energy function is often costly, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Aaron Havens , Brian Karrer , Neta Shaul

Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions is a fundamental challenge in computational physics and machine learning. While score-based and variational methods have achieved success in continuous domains, extending them to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Lei Li , Zhen Wang , Lishuo Zhang

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distribution in which we aim to minimise the Kullback--Leibler…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-11 Francesca R. Crucinio , Sahani Pathiraja

Sparse inversion and classification problems are ubiquitous in modern data science and imaging. They are often formulated as non-smooth minimisation problems. In sparse inversion, we minimise, e.g., the sum of a data fidelity term and an…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-11-23 Jonas Latz

In this paper we study a gradient flow approach to the problem of quantization of measures in one dimension. By embedding our problem in $L^2$, we find a continuous version of it that corresponds to the limit as the number of particles…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2016-01-26 Emanuele Caglioti , François Golse , Mikaela Iacobelli

In a variety of applications it is important to extract information from a probability measure $\mu$ on an infinite dimensional space. Examples include the Bayesian approach to inverse problems and possibly conditioned) continuous time…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-06-02 Frank Pinski , Gideon Simpson , Andrew Stuart , Hendrik Weber

Score-based diffusion models currently constitute the state of the art in continuous generative modeling. These methods are typically formulated via overdamped or underdamped Ornstein--Uhlenbeck-type stochastic differential equations, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Herlock Rahimi

This paper is concerned with sampling from probability distributions $\pi$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ admitting a density of the form $\pi(x) \propto e^{-U(x)}$, where $U(x)=F(x)+G(Kx)$ with $K$ being a linear operator and $G$ being…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-28 Andreas Habring , Martin Holler , Thomas Pock