Related papers: Wasserstein Gradient Flow over Variational Paramet…
Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…
Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization offers a framework for model fitting in machine learning under potential shifts in the data distribution. We study a regularized variant of this problem in which entropic smoothing produces a…
Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…
As the problem of minimizing functionals on the Wasserstein space encompasses many applications in machine learning, different optimization algorithms on $\mathbb{R}^d$ have received their counterpart analog on the Wasserstein space. We…
Solving Fredholm equations of the first kind is crucial in many areas of the applied sciences. In this work we adopt a probabilistic and variational point of view by considering a minimization problem in the space of probability measures…
Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…
In this article, we formulate topology optimization problems concerning the mass distribution as minimization problems for functionals on the Wasserstein space. We relax optimization problems regarding non-convex objective functions on the…
Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
We study a natural Wasserstein gradient flow on manifolds of probability distributions with discrete sample spaces. We derive the Riemannian structure for the probability simplex from the dynamical formulation of the Wasserstein distance on…
Many machine learning problems can be seen as approximating a \textit{target} distribution using a \textit{particle} distribution by minimizing their statistical discrepancy. Wasserstein Gradient Flow can move particles along a path that…
Minimizing functionals in the space of probability distributions can be done with Wasserstein gradient flows. To solve them numerically, a possible approach is to rely on the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme which is analogous to the…
Many tasks in machine learning and signal processing can be solved by minimizing a convex function of a measure. This includes sparse spikes deconvolution or training a neural network with a single hidden layer. For these problems, we study…
Distributionally-robust optimization is often studied for a fixed set of distributions rather than time-varying distributions that can drift significantly over time (which is, for instance, the case in finance and sociology due to…
We develop a fast and scalable numerical approach to solve Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs), particularly suitable for high-dimensional cases. Our approach is to use general reduced-order models, like deep neural networks, to parameterize…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…
A nonlinear diffusion equation, interpreted as a Wasserstein gradient flow, is numerically solved in one space dimension using a higher-order minimizing movement scheme based on the BDF (backward differentiation formula) discretization. In…
Inverse problems in physical or biological sciences often involve recovering an unknown parameter that is random. The sought-after quantity is a probability distribution of the unknown parameter, that produces data that aligns with…
Online optimization has gained increasing interest due to its capability of tracking real-world streaming data. Although online optimization methods have been widely studied in the setting of frequentist statistics, few works have…