Related papers: Variance Control for Black Box Variational Inferen…
We introduce a novel covariance estimator for portfolio selection that adapts to the non-stationary or persistent heteroskedastic environments of financial time series by employing exponentially weighted averages and nonlinearly shrinking…
In this paper, we provide a generalized framework for Variational Inference-Stochastic Optimal Control by using thenon-extensive Tsallis divergence. By incorporating the deformed exponential function into the optimality likelihood function,…
We propose a Stein variational distributionally robust controller for nonlinear dynamical systems with latent parametric uncertainty. The method is an alternative to conservative worst-case ambiguity-set optimization with a deterministic…
Variance-Gamma distributions are widely used in financial modelling and contain as special cases the normal, Gamma and Laplace distributions. In this paper we extend Stein's method to this class of distributions. In particular, we obtain a…
Variational families with full-rank covariance approximations are known not to work well in black-box variational inference (BBVI), both empirically and theoretically. In fact, recent computational complexity results for BBVI have…
We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…
Sufficient statistics are derived for the population size and parameters of commonly used closed population mark-recapture models. Rao-Blackwellization details for improving estimators that are not functions of the statistics are presented.…
Understanding how different classes are distributed in an unlabeled data set is an important challenge for the calibration of probabilistic classifiers and uncertainty quantification. Approaches like adjusted classify and count, black-box…
First, we analyze the variance of the Cross Validation (CV)-based estimators used for estimating the performance of classification rules. Second, we propose a novel estimator to estimate this variance using the Influence Function (IF)…
Optimization with noisy gradients has become ubiquitous in statistics and machine learning. Reparameterization gradients, or gradient estimates computed via the "reparameterization trick," represent a class of noisy gradients often used in…
The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning…
We overview a series of recent works devoted to variance reduction techniques for numerical stochastic homogenization. Numerical homogenization requires solving a set of problems at the micro scale, the so-called corrector problems. In a…
When the available information is noisy zeroth-order (ZO) oracle, stochastic approximation methods are popular for estimating the root of the multivariate gradient equation. Inspired by the Stein's identity, this work establishes a novel…
In this paper we present a new approach to control variates for improving computational efficiency of Ensemble Monte Carlo. We present the approach using simulation of paths of a time-dependent nonlinear stochastic equation. The core idea…
A new method for learning variational autoencoders (VAEs) is developed, based on Stein variational gradient descent. A key advantage of this approach is that one need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder…
Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…
In black-box large language model (LLM) services, response reliability is often only partially observable at decision time, while stronger inference pathways incur substantial computational cost, inducing a budgeted sequential decision…
We investigate an application of a mathematically robust minimization method -- the gradient method -- to the consistencization problem of a pairwise comparisons (PC) matrix. Our approach sheds new light on the notion of a priority vector…
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the…
Traditional approaches to variational inference rely on parametric families of variational distributions, with the choice of family playing a critical role in determining the accuracy of the resulting posterior approximation. Simple…