Related papers: A connection between Tempering and Entropic Mirror…
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 distributions in which we aim to minimise the Kullback--Leibler…
Geometric tempering is a popular approach to sampling from challenging multi-modal probability distributions by instead sampling from a sequence of distributions which interpolate, using the geometric mean, between an easier proposal…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithms are among the most widely used sampling methods in high dimensional settings, yet their convergence properties are poorly understood in divergences that quantify relative density mismatch, such as…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…
For training an encoder network to perform amortized variational inference, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence from the exact posterior to its approximation, known as the inclusive or forward KL, is an increasingly popular choice of…
We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…
In this paper, we analyze the local convergence rate of optimistic mirror descent methods in stochastic variational inequalities, a class of optimization problems with important applications to learning theory and machine learning. Our…
In this article we consider a Bayesian inverse problem associated to elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in two and three dimensions. This class of inverse problems is important in applications such as hydrology, but the…
Simulating the kinetic Langevin dynamics is a popular approach for sampling from distributions, where only their unnormalized densities are available. Various discretizations of the kinetic Langevin dynamics have been considered, where the…
We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
We propose a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for sampling from unnormalized target distributions based on a reverse denoising diffusion process. While recent diffusion-based samplers simulate the reverse diffusion using…
We provide theoretical guarantees for convergence of discrete-time policy mirror descent with inexact advantage functions updated using temporal difference (TD) learning for entropy regularised MDPs in Polish state and action spaces. We…
Inspired by the recent paper (L. Ying, Mirror descent algorithms for minimizing interacting free energy, Journal of Scientific Computing, 84 (2020), pp. 1-14),we explore the relationship between the mirror descent and the variable metric…
Recent work by Woodworth et al. (2020) shows that the optimization dynamics of gradient descent for overparameterized problems can be viewed as low-dimensional dual dynamics induced by a mirror map, explaining the implicit regularization…
In this paper, we examine the convergence of mirror descent in a class of stochastic optimization problems that are not necessarily convex (or even quasi-convex), and which we call variationally coherent. Since the standard technique of…
This paper is concerned with convergence analysis for the mirror descent (MD) method, a well-known algorithm in convex optimization. An analysis framework via integral quadratic constraints (IQCs) is constructed to analyze the convergence…
We study the implicit Langevin Monte Carlo (iLMC) method, which simulates the overdamped Langevin equation via an implicit iteration rule. In many applications, iLMC is favored over other explicit schemes such as the (explicit) Langevin…
The stochastic mirror descent (SMD) algorithm is a general class of training algorithms, which includes the celebrated stochastic gradient descent (SGD), as a special case. It utilizes a mirror potential to influence the implicit bias of…
The Expectation--Maximization Maximum Likelihood (EMML) algorithm belongs to the Expectation--Maximization family and is widely used for image reconstruction problems under Poisson noise.In this paper, we reinterpret EMML as a mirror…
The performance of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers heavily depends on the tuning of the Markov kernels used in the path proposal. For SMC samplers with unadjusted Markov kernels, standard tuning objectives, such as the…