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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.…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have gained attention in the Bayesian inference literature, for their capacity to yield flexible and accurate approximations. We explore ParVIs from the perspective of Wasserstein…
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…
Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…
We introduce a new variational inference (VI) framework, called energetic variational inference (EVI). It minimizes the VI objective function based on a prescribed energy-dissipation law. Using the EVI framework, we can derive many existing…
Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…
Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…
A new gradient-based particle sampling method, MPM-ParVI, based on material point method (MPM), is proposed for variational inference. MPM-ParVI simulates the deformation of a deformable body (e.g. a solid or fluid) under external effects…
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…
Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
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…
In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…
Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…
A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…
Deep learning-based domain adaptation (DA) methods have shown strong performance by learning transferable representations. However, their reliance on mini-batch training limits global distribution modeling, leading to unstable alignment and…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…
This paper is concerned with the approximation of probability distributions known up to normalization constants, with a focus on Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in scientific computing. In this context, key challenges…
A reward-guided, gradient-free ParVI method, \textit{R-ParVI}, is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant). R-ParVI formulates the sampling problem as particle flow driven by rewards: particles are drawn from…
Generalized additive index models (GAIMs) offer a flexible semiparametric framework for capturing complex data relationships, balancing the interpretability of parametric models with the flexibility of nonparametric approaches. However,…
In this article, we introduce a three-precision formulation of the General Alternating-Direction Implicit method (GADI) designed to accelerate the solution of large-scale sparse linear systems $Ax=b$. GADI is a framework that can represent…