Related papers: Stochastic variance-reduced Gaussian variational i…
Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization (EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However, EM…
We study a variance reduction strategy based on control variables for simulating the averaged macroscopic behavior of a stochastic slow-fast system. We assume that this averaged behavior can be written in terms of a few slow degrees of…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…
Bayesian inference typically requires the computation of an approximation to the posterior distribution. An important requirement for an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm is to output high-accuracy posterior mean and uncertainty…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
We develop a novel method for carrying out model selection for Bayesian autoencoders (BAEs) by means of prior hyper-parameter optimization. Inspired by the common practice of type-II maximum likelihood optimization and its equivalence to…
It is a common phenomenon that for high-dimensional and nonparametric statistical models, rate-optimal estimators balance squared bias and variance. Although this balancing is widely observed, little is known whether methods exist that…
We propose a modification of the standard linear implicit Euler integrator for the weak approximation of parabolic semilinear stochastic PDEs driven by additive space-time white noise. The new method can easily be combined with a finite…
Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…
The control variates method is a classical variance reduction technique for Monte Carlo estimators that exploits correlated auxiliary variables without introducing bias. In many applications, the quantity of interest can be expressed as a…
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it…
Wasserstein gradient flows have become a central tool for optimization problems over probability measures. A natural numerical approach is forward-Euler time discretization. We show, however, that even in the simple case where the energy…
In Bayesian machine learning, the posterior distribution is typically computationally intractable, hence variational inference is often required. In this approach, an evidence lower bound on the log likelihood of data is maximized during…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
The Poisson model is frequently employed to describe count data, but in a Bayesian context it leads to an analytically intractable posterior probability distribution. In this work, we analyze a variational Gaussian approximation to the…
In this paper, we propose an implicit gradient descent algorithm for the classic $k$-means problem. The implicit gradient step or backward Euler is solved via stochastic fixed-point iteration, in which we randomly sample a mini-batch…
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…
In predictive modeling with simulation or machine learning, it is critical to accurately assess the quality of estimated values through output analysis. In recent decades output analysis has become enriched with methods that quantify the…