Related papers: Wasserstein Gradient Flow over Variational Paramet…
Recent research has seen several advances relevant to black-box VI, but the current state of automatic posterior inference is unclear. One such advance is the use of normalizing flows to define flexible posterior densities for deep latent…
The Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm is a deterministic particle method for sampling. However, a mean-field analysis reveals that the gradient flow corresponding to the SVGD algorithm (i.e., the Stein Variational Gradient…
We consider the optimization problem of minimizing an objective functional, which admits a variational form and is defined over probability distributions on the constrained domain, which poses challenges to both theoretical analysis and…
Many applications in machine learning involve data represented as probability distributions. The emergence of such data requires radically novel techniques to design tractable gradient flows on probability distributions over this type of…
A novel optimization approach is proposed for application to policy gradient methods and evolution strategies for reinforcement learning (RL). The procedure uses a computationally efficient Wasserstein natural gradient (WNG) descent that…
We investigate a stochastic program with expected value constraints, addressing the problem in a general context through Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) approach using Wasserstein distances, where the ambiguity set depends on the…
We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of…
In this paper, we propose a novel numerical scheme to optimize the gradient flows for learning energy-based models (EBMs). From a perspective of physical simulation, we redefine the problem of approximating the gradient flow utilizing…
Estimating free energy is a fundamental problem in statistical mechanics. Recently, machine-learning-based methods, particularly the variational autoregressive networks (VANs) have been proposed to minimize variational free energy and to…
We consider a distributionally robust second-order stochastic dominance constrained optimization problem. We require the dominance constraints hold with respect to all probability distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered at the…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
We present a novel approach to approximate Gaussian and mixture-of-Gaussians filtering. Our method relies on a variational approximation via a gradient-flow representation. The gradient flow is derived from a Kullback--Leibler discrepancy…
Optimization over the space of probability measures endowed with the Wasserstein-2 geometry is central to modern machine learning and mean-field modeling. However, traditional methods relying on full Wasserstein gradients often suffer from…
We propose an optimization algorithm for Variational Inference (VI) in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates where the variational space is a Riemann manifold. We develop an efficient algorithm for Gaussian…
Variational problems that involve Wasserstein distances have been recently proposed to summarize and learn from probability measures. Despite being conceptually simple, such problems are computationally challenging because they involve…
We study the decentralized distributed computation of discrete approximations for the regularized Wasserstein barycenter of a finite set of continuous probability measures distributedly stored over a network. We assume there is a network of…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
This paper considers the problem of solving systems of quadratic equations, namely, recovering an object of interest $\mathbf{x}^{\natural}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ from $m$ quadratic equations/samples…
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…
We study multi-objective optimization over probability distributions in Wasserstein space. Recently, Nguyen et al. (2025) introduced Multiple Wasserstein Gradient Descent (MWGraD) algorithm, which exploits the geometric structure of…