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We propose a novel Wasserstein method with a distillation mechanism, yielding joint learning of word embeddings and topics. The proposed method is based on the fact that the Euclidean distance between word embeddings may be employed as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-14 Hongteng Xu , Wenlin Wang , Wei Liu , Lawrence Carin

The Wasserstein barycenter extends the Euclidean mean to the space of probability measures by minimizing the weighted sum of squared 2-Wasserstein distances. We develop a free-support algorithm for computing Wasserstein barycenters that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-17 Kisung You

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous…

Bayesian inference typically requires the computation of an approximation to the posterior distribution. An important requirement for an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm is to output high-accuracy posterior mean and uncertainty…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-03 Jonathan H. Huggins , Trevor Campbell , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Tamara Broderick

We establish the first mathematically rigorous link between Bayesian, variational Bayesian, and ensemble methods. A key step towards this it to reformulate the non-convex optimisation problem typically encountered in deep learning as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-24 Veit David Wild , Sahra Ghalebikesabi , Dino Sejdinovic , Jeremias Knoblauch

This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically used to model distributions over continuous spaces, and generative flow networks (GFlowNets), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Nikolay Malkin , Salem Lahlou , Tristan Deleu , Xu Ji , Edward Hu , Katie Everett , Dinghuai Zhang , Yoshua Bengio

A novel variational inference based resampling framework is proposed to evaluate the robustness and generalization capability of deep learning models with respect to distribution shift. We use Auto Encoding Variational Bayes to find a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Xudong Sun , Alexej Gossmann , Yu Wang , Bernd Bischl

Score-based diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools in generative modeling, yet their theoretical foundations remain underexplored. In this work, we focus on the Wasserstein convergence analysis of score-based diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-10 Yifeng Yu , Lu Yu

Many scientific systems, such as cellular populations or economic cohorts, are naturally described by probability distributions that evolve over time. Predicting how such a system would have evolved under different forces or initial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-26 Tristan Luca Saidi , Gonzalo Mena , Larry Wasserman , Florian Gunsilius

In several machine learning tasks for graph structured data, the graphs under consideration may be composed of a varying number of nodes. Therefore, it is necessary to design pooling methods that aggregate the graph representations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Effrosyni Simou

Natural-gradient methods enable fast and simple algorithms for variational inference, but due to computational difficulties, their use is mostly limited to \emph{minimal} exponential-family (EF) approximations. In this paper, we extend…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-09 Wu Lin , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Mark Schmidt

Recently, Deng et al. (2026) proposed Generative Modeling via Drifting (GMD), a novel framework for generative tasks. This note presents an analysis of GMD through the lens of Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF), i.e., the path of steepest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Arthur Gretton , Li Kevin Wenliang , Alexandre Galashov , James Thornton , Valentin De Bortoli , Arnaud Doucet

We introduce a novel discretization scheme for Wasserstein gradient flows that involves successively computing Schr\"{o}dinger bridges with the same marginals. This is different from both the forward/geodesic approximation and the…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-06-18 Medha Agarwal , Zaid Harchaoui , Garrett Mulcahy , Soumik Pal

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

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)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

We give a comprehensive description of Wasserstein gradient flows of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) functionals $\mathcal F_\nu := \text{MMD}_K^2(\cdot, \nu)$ towards given target measures $\nu$ on the real line, where we focus on the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-12-05 Richard Duong , Viktor Stein , Robert Beinert , Johannes Hertrich , Gabriele Steidl

Flow Matching has recently gained attention in generative modeling as a simple and flexible alternative to diffusion models. While existing statistical guarantees adapt tools from the analysis of diffusion models, we take a different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Lea Kunkel , Mathias Trabs

The Bayesian Synthetic Likelihood (BSL) method is a widely-used tool for likelihood-free Bayesian inference. This method assumes that some summary statistics are normally distributed, which can be incorrect in many applications. We propose…

Computation · Statistics 2024-08-16 Nhat-Minh Nguyen , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Christopher Drovandi , David Nott

Generative flow networks (GFNs) are a class of models for sequential sampling of composite objects, which approximate a target distribution that is defined in terms of an energy function or a reward. GFNs are typically trained using a flow…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-17 Heiko Zimmermann , Fredrik Lindsten , Jan-Willem van de Meent , Christian A. Naesseth

Conditional distribution is a fundamental quantity for describing the relationship between a response and a predictor. We propose a Wasserstein generative approach to learning a conditional distribution. The proposed approach uses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Shiao Liu , Xingyu Zhou , Yuling Jiao , Jian Huang
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