Related papers: Understanding Stochastic Natural Gradient Variatio…

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

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…

Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…

Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…

We introduce a simple algorithm, True Asymptotic Natural Gradient Optimization (TANGO), that converges to a true natural gradient descent in the limit of small learning rates, without explicit Fisher matrix estimation. For quadratic models…

In this paper we investigate how gradient-based algorithms such as gradient descent, (multi-pass) stochastic gradient descent, its persistent variant, and the Langevin algorithm navigate non-convex loss-landscapes and which of them is able…

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…

In stochastic variational inference, the variational Bayes objective function is optimized using stochastic gradient approximation, where gradients computed on small random subsets of data are used to approximate the true gradient over the…

Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the…

We prove quantitative convergence rates at which discrete Langevin-like processes converge to the invariant distribution of a related stochastic differential equation. We study the setup where the additive noise can be non-Gaussian and…

We present Natural Gradient Boosting (NGBoost), an algorithm for generic probabilistic prediction via gradient boosting. Typical regression models return a point estimate, conditional on covariates, but probabilistic regression models…

Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba-…

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

The proximal inertial gradient descent is efficient for the composite minimization and applicable for broad of machine learning problems. In this paper, we revisit the computational complexity of this algorithm and present other novel…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…