Related papers: Enhancing Low-Precision Sampling via Stochastic Gr…
It is known that gradient-based MCMC samplers for continuous spaces, such as Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), can be derived as particle versions of a gradient flow that minimizes KL divergence on a Wasserstein manifold. The superior efficiency…
Large crossed mixed effects models with imbalanced structures and missing data pose major computational challenges for standard Bayesian posterior sampling algorithms, as the computational complexity is usually superlinear in the number of…
Gaussian latent variable models are a key class of Bayesian hierarchical models with applications in many fields. Performing Bayesian inference on such models can be challenging as Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms struggle with the…
We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…
The problem of sampling a target probability distribution on a constrained domain arises in many applications including machine learning. For constrained sampling, various Langevin algorithms such as projected Langevin Monte Carlo (PLMC),…
Low precision operations can provide scalability, memory savings, portability, and energy efficiency. This paper proposes SWALP, an approach to low precision training that averages low-precision SGD iterates with a modified learning rate…
We consider the constrained sampling problem where the goal is to sample from a target distribution on a constrained domain. We propose skew-reflected non-reversible Langevin dynamics (SRNLD), a continuous-time stochastic differential…
We consider the problem of Bayesian parameter estimation for deep neural networks, which is important in problem settings where we may have little data, and/ or where we need accurate posterior predictive densities, e.g., for applications…
Most existing approximate Thompson Sampling (TS) algorithms for multi-armed bandits use Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) or its variants in each round to sample from the posterior, relaxing the need for conjugacy assumptions…
We present a nonlinear (in the sense of McKean) generalization of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) termed nonlinear HMC (nHMC) capable of sampling from nonlinear probability measures of mean-field type. When the underlying confinement…
Stochastic gradient methods for minimizing nonconvex composite objective functions typically rely on the Lipschitz smoothness of the differentiable part, but this assumption fails in many important problem classes like quadratic inverse…
We propose a unifying view of two different Bayesian inference algorithms, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), leading to improved and efficient novel sampling schemes. We…
In this paper, we are concerned with a non-asymptotic analysis of sampling algorithms used in nonconvex optimization. In particular, we obtain non-asymptotic estimates in Wasserstein-1 and Wasserstein-2 distances for a popular class of…
Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally expensive. Both the calculation of the acceptance probability and the creation of informed proposals usually require an iteration through the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in Bayesian computations. However, they need to access the full data set in order to evaluate the posterior density at every step of the algorithm. This results in a great…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…
Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…
The curse of dimensionality presents a pervasive challenge in optimization problems, with exponential expansion of the search space rapidly causing traditional algorithms to become inefficient or infeasible. An adaptive sampling strategy is…
Sequential Monte Carlo samplers represent a compelling approach to posterior inference in Bayesian models, due to being parallelisable and providing an unbiased estimate of the posterior normalising constant. In this work, we significantly…