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Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-04-13 Michael Diao , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Sinho Chewi , Adil Salim

The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

Full waveform inversion (FWI) enables us to obtain high-resolution velocity models of the subsurface. However, estimating the associated uncertainties in the process is not trivial. Commonly, uncertainty estimation is performed within the…

Geophysics · Physics 2023-05-16 Muhammad Izzatullah , Matteo Ravasi , Tariq Alkhalifah

We provide finite-particle convergence rates for the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm in the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy ($\mathsf{KSD}$) and Wasserstein-2 metrics. Our key insight is that the time derivative of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Sayan Banerjee , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Promit Ghosal

It is known that the Langevin dynamics used in MCMC is the gradient flow of the KL divergence on the Wasserstein space, which helps convergence analysis and inspires recent particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs). But no more…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-05 Chang Liu , Jingwei Zhuo , Jun Zhu

We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-05 Anna Korba , Adil Salim , Michael Arbel , Giulia Luise , Arthur Gretton

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 A. Duncan , N. Nuesken , L. Szpruch

We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Jiaojiao Fan , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Qingzhong Ai , Shiyu Liu , Lirong He , Zenglin Xu

In this work, we propose a new particle-based variational inference (ParVI) method for accelerating the Energetic Variational Inference with Implicit scheme (EVI-Im) introduced in Ref. \cite{wang2021particle}. Inspired by energy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-14 Xuelian Bao , Lulu Kang , Chun Liu , Yiwei Wang

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a non-parametric inference algorithm that evolves a set of particles to fit a given distribution of interest. We analyze the non-asymptotic properties of SVGD, showing that there exists a set of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Qiang Liu , Dilin Wang

We formalize an equivalence between two popular methods for Bayesian inference: Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and black-box variational inference (BBVI). In particular, we show that BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Casey Chu , Kentaro Minami , Kenji Fukumizu

A new variational inference method, SPH-ParVI, based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant) or sampling using gradients. SPH-ParVI simulates the flow of a fluid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Yongchao Huang

In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-03 Jose L. Varona-Santana , Marcos A. Capistrán

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) refers to a class of methods for Bayesian inference based on interacting particle systems. In this paper, we consider the originally proposed deterministic dynamics as well as a stochastic variant,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-26 Nikolas Nüsken , D. R. Michiel Renger

We propose a Stein variational gradient descent method to concurrently sparsify, train, and provide uncertainty quantification of a complexly parameterized model such as a neural network. It employs a graph reconciliation and condensation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Govinda Anantha Padmanabha , Cosmin Safta , Nikolaos Bouklas , Reese E. Jones

Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Adil Salim , Anna Korba , Giulia Luise

We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Yiheng Jiang , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…

Ensembles of deep neural networks have achieved great success recently, but they do not offer a proper Bayesian justification. Moreover, while they allow for averaging of predictions over several hypotheses, they do not provide any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Francesco D'Angelo , Vincent Fortuin , Florian Wenzel