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The natural gradient method is widely used in statistical optimization, but its standard formulation assumes a Euclidean parameter space. This paper proposes an inversion-free stochastic natural gradient method for probability distributions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Dario Draca , Takuo Matsubara , Minh-Ngoc Tran

The convergence theory for the gradient sampling algorithm is extended to directionally Lipschitz functions. Although directionally Lipschitz functions are not necessarily locally Lipschitz, they are almost everywhere differentiable and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-13 James V. Burke , Qiuying Lin

Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is a powerful tool for nonparametric regression, but its application in a fully Bayesian fashion in high-dimensional settings is hindered by two primary challenges: the difficulty of variable selection and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-11 Peter Knaus

Uncertainty sampling, a popular active learning algorithm, is used to reduce the amount of data required to learn a classifier, but it has been observed in practice to converge to different parameters depending on the initialization and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-06 Stephen Mussmann , Percy Liang

We propose a novel Riemannian geometric framework for variational inference in Bayesian models based on the nonparametric Fisher-Rao metric on the manifold of probability density functions. Under the square-root density representation, the…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-03-29 Abhijoy Saha , Karthik Bharath , Sebastian Kurtek

In classic distributed graph problems, each instance on a graph specifies a space of feasible solutions (e.g. all proper ($\Delta+1$)-list-colorings of the graph), and the task of distributed algorithm is to construct a feasible solution…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-02-20 Weiming Feng , Yitong Yin

Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-18 Ohad Shamir

Existing work on population dynamics inference often focuses on flows arising from vector fields that are the gradients of scalar potentials. Among all admissible flows that are compatible with the population dynamics, gradient flows are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jules Berman , Tobias Blickhan , Benjamin Peherstorfer

We introduce a novel discretization scheme for Wasserstein gradient flows that involves successively computing Schr\"{o}dinger bridges with the same marginals. This is different from both the forward/geodesic approximation and the…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-06-18 Medha Agarwal , Zaid Harchaoui , Garrett Mulcahy , Soumik Pal

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

Stochastic-gradient sampling methods are often used to perform Bayesian inference on neural networks. It has been observed that the methods in which notions of differential geometry are included tend to have better performances, with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Hanlin Yu , Marcelo Hartmann , Bernardo Williams , Arto Klami

This work considers the problem of sampling from a probability distribution known up to a normalization constant while satisfying a set of statistical constraints specified by the expected values of general nonlinear functions. This problem…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-08 Luiz F. O. Chamon , Mohammad Reza Karimi , Anna Korba

Turbulent flows are chaotic and unsteady, but their statistical distribution converges to a statistical steady state. Engineering quantities of interest typically take the form of time-average statistics such as $ \frac{1}{t} \int_0^t f (…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-09-17 Tom Hickling , Jonathan F. MacArt , Justin Sirignano , Den Waidmann

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-05 Yuling Yan , Kaizheng Wang , Philippe Rigollet

We examine the infinite-dimensional optimization problem of finding a decomposition of a probability measure into K probability sub-measures to minimize specific loss functions inspired by applications in clustering and user grouping. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Jiangze Han , Christopher Thomas Ryan , Xin T. Tong

In this paper we bring together some of the key ideas and methods of two disparate fields of mathematical research, frame theory and optimal transport, using the methods of the second to answer questions posed in the first. In particular,…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2022-12-01 Clare Wickman , Kasso Okoudjou

Adaptive sampling algorithms are modern and efficient methods that dynamically adjust the sample size throughout the optimization process. However, they may encounter difficulties in risk-averse settings, particularly due to the challenge…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-17 Sandra Pieraccini , Tommaso Vanzan

We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framework dynamically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Corentin Salaün , Xingchang Huang , Iliyan Georgiev , Niloy J. Mitra , Gurprit Singh

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

In many problems in data mining and machine learning, data items that need to be clustered or classified are not points in a high-dimensional space, but are distributions (points on a high dimensional simplex). For distributions, natural…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2007-07-13 Sudipto Guha , Andrew McGregor , Suresh Venkatasubramanian