English
Related papers

Related papers: Algorithms for mean-field variational inference vi…

200 papers

Discretizations of Langevin diffusions provide a powerful method for sampling and Bayesian inference. However, such discretizations require evaluation of the gradient of the potential function. In several real-world scenarios, obtaining…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-01-19 Abhishek Roy , Lingqing Shen , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

The manifold hypothesis posits that high-dimensional data typically resides on low-dimensional sub spaces. In this paper, we assume manifold hypothesis to investigate graph-based semi-supervised learning methods. In particular, we examine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Mary Chriselda Antony Oliver , Michael Roberts , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb , Matthew Thorpe

We propose a descent subgradient algorithm for unconstrained nonsmooth nonconvex multiobjective optimization problems. To find a descent direction, we present an iterative process that efficiently approximates the Goldstein subdifferential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-24 Morteza Maleknia , Majid Soleimani-damaneh

The recently developed Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods drive the empirical distribution of a set of \emph{fixed-weight} particles towards a given target distribution $\pi$ by iteratively updating particles' positions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Chao Zhang , Zhijian Li , Hui Qian , Xin Du

The subject of this paper is the estimation of a probability measure on ${\mathbb R}^d$ from data observed with an additive noise, under the Wasserstein metric of order $p$ (with $p\geq 1$). We assume that the distribution of the errors is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-07-22 Jérôme Dedecker , Bertrand Michel

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Dai Hai Nguyen , Duc Dung Nguyen , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

Approximate inference in high-dimensional, discrete probabilistic models is a central problem in computational statistics and machine learning. This paper describes discrete particle variational inference (DPVI), a new approach that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-08 Ardavan Saeedi , Tejas D Kulkarni , Vikash Mansinghka , Samuel Gershman

Wasserstein gradient and Hamiltonian flows have emerged as essential tools for modeling complex dynamics in the natural sciences, with applications ranging from partial differential equations (PDEs) and optimal transport to quantum…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Jianyu Hu , Juan-Pablo Ortega , Daiying Yin

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

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Ziheng Cheng , Longlin Yu , Tianyu Xie , Shiyue Zhang , Cheng Zhang

Mean-Field is an efficient way to approximate a posterior distribution in complex graphical models and constitutes the most popular class of Bayesian variational approximation methods. In most applications, the mean field distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-23 Pierre Baqué , Jean-Hubert Hours , François Fleuret , Pascal Fua

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

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

The Wasserstein distance has emerged as a key metric to quantify distances between probability distributions, with applications in various fields, including machine learning, control theory, decision theory, and biological systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Eduardo Figueiredo , Steven Adams , Luca Laurenti

Wasserstein gradient flows provide a powerful means of understanding and solving many diffusion equations. Specifically, Fokker-Planck equations, which model the diffusion of probability measures, can be understood as gradient descent over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Petr Mokrov , Alexander Korotin , Lingxiao Li , Aude Genevay , Justin Solomon , Evgeny Burnaev

We expound on some known lower bounds of the quadratic Wasserstein distance between random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with an emphasis on affine transformations that have been used in manifold learning of data in Wasserstein space. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-09 Keaton Hamm , Andrzej Korzeniowski

The Wasserstein distance is an attractive tool for data analysis but statistical inference is hindered by the lack of distributional limits. To overcome this obstacle, for probability measures supported on finitely many points, we derive…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-27 Max Sommerfeld , Axel Munk

We present new algorithms to compute the mean of a set of empirical probability measures under the optimal transport metric. This mean, known as the Wasserstein barycenter, is the measure that minimizes the sum of its Wasserstein distances…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-06-18 Marco Cuturi , Arnaud Doucet

We propose a mean-field optimal control problem for the parameter identification of a given pattern. The cost functional is based on the Wasserstein distance between the probability measures of the modeled and the desired patterns. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-08 Martin Burger , Lisa Maria Kreusser , Claudia Totzeck

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Dang H. Nguyen , Duy Nguyen