Related papers: Stein transport for Bayesian inference
Rare event simulation and rare event probability estimation are important tasks within the analysis of systems subject to uncertainty and randomness. Simultaneously, accurately estimating rare event probabilities is an inherently difficult…
Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…
Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…
Particle-based variational inference offers a flexible way of approximating complex posterior distributions with a set of particles. In this paper we introduce a new particle-based variational inference method based on the theory of…
Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…
Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), a popular sampling algorithm, is often described as the kernelized gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler divergence in the geometry of optimal transport. We introduce a new perspective on SVGD…
Wasserstein distance (WD) and the associated optimal transport plan have been proven useful in many applications where probability measures are at stake. In this paper, we propose a new proxy of the squared WD, coined min-SWGG, that is…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based method for Bayesian inference. However, its convergence suffers from the variance collapse, which reduces the accuracy and diversity of the estimation. In this paper, we…
Motivated by the omnipresence of extreme value distributions in limit theorems involving extremes of random processes, we adapt Stein's method to include these laws as possible target distributions. We do so by using the generator approach…
We consider the optimization problem of minimizing a functional defined over a family of probability distributions, where the objective functional is assumed to possess a variational form. Such a distributional optimization problem arises…
We propose a novel distributed inference algorithm for continuous graphical models, by extending Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to leverage the Markov dependency structure of the distribution of interest. Our approach combines…
In Bayesian inference, the posterior distributions are difficult to obtain analytically for complex models such as neural networks. Variational inference usually uses a parametric distribution for approximation, from which we can easily…
We present a novel second-order trajectory optimization algorithm based on Stein Variational Newton's Method and Maximum Entropy Differential Dynamic Programming. The proposed algorithm, called Stein Variational Differential Dynamic…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the…
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…
We develop Riemannian Stein Variational Gradient Descent (RSVGD), a Bayesian inference method that generalizes Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to Riemann manifold. The benefits are two-folds: (i) for inference tasks in Euclidean…
We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…
In machine learning and computer vision, optimal transport has had significant success in learning generative models and defining metric distances between structured and stochastic data objects, that can be cast as probability measures. The…
Traditional preamble detection algorithms have low accuracy in the grant-based random access scheme in massive machine-type communication (mMTC). We present a novel preamble detection algorithm based on Stein variational gradient descent…