English
Related papers

Related papers: A Trust-Region Method for Graphical Stein Variatio…

200 papers

This paper examines the spatial coverage optimization problem for multiple sensors in a known convex environment, where the coverage service of each sensor is heterogeneous and anisotropic. We introduce the Stein Coverage algorithm, a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Donipolo Ghimire , Solmaz S. Kia

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Ziheng Cheng , Longlin Yu , Tianyu Xie , Shiyue Zhang , Cheng Zhang

In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-05 Simon Weissmann , Jakob Zech

Particle-based approximate Bayesian inference approaches such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combine the flexibility and convergence guarantees of sampling methods with the computational benefits of variational inference. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Lauro Langosco di Langosco , Vincent Fortuin , Heiko Strathmann

The expressiveness of flow-based models combined with stochastic variational inference (SVI) has expanded the application of optimization-based Bayesian inference to highly complex problems. However, despite the importance of multi-model…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-17 Laurence Davies , Dan Mackinlay , Rafael Oliveira , Scott A. Sisson

In this paper, we propose and analyze a trust-region model-based algorithm for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Our framework utilizes random models of an objective function $f(x)$, obtained from stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-26 Ruobing Chen , Matt Menickelly , Katya Scheinberg

Stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) provide a means for modeling various optimization and equilibrium problems where data are subject to uncertainty. Often it is necessary to estimate the true SVI solution by the solution of a sample…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-06-27 Michael Lamm , Shu Lu , Amarjit Budhiraja

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-29 Alexander Moreno , Tameem Adel , Edward Meeds , James M. Rehg , Max Welling

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Jun Han , Fan Ding , Xianglong Liu , Lorenzo Torresani , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables Bayesian analysis when the likelihood is intractable but model simulations are available. Recent advances in statistics and machine learning, including Approximate Bayesian Computation and deep…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-15 Haoyu Jiang , Yuexi Wang , Yun Yang

We propose a fast and scalable variational method for Bayesian inference in high-dimensional parameter space, which we call projected Stein variational Newton (pSVN) method. We exploit the intrinsic low-dimensional geometric structure of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-11 Peng Chen , Keyi Wu , Joshua Chen , Thomas O'Leary-Roseberry , Omar Ghattas

Continual learning in neural networks aims to learn new tasks without forgetting old tasks. Sequential function-space variational inference (SFSVI) uses a Gaussian variational distribution to approximate the distribution of the outputs of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Menghao Waiyan William Zhu , Pengcheng Hao , Ercan Engin Kuruoğlu

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-02 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

We propose a novel particle-based variational inference method designed to work with multimodal distributions. Our approach, referred to as Branched Stein Variational Gradient Descent (BSVGD), extends the classical Stein Variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Isaías Bañales , Arturo Jaramillo , Joshué Helí Ricalde-Guerrero

The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

In recent years, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) have grown in popularity as scalable methods for Bayesian inference. Unfortunately, the properties of such methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-24 Yvann Le Fay , Nicolas Chopin , Simon Barthelmé

The sample average approximation (SAA) and the stochastic approximation (SA) are two popular schemes for solving the stochastic variational inequalities problem (SVIP). In the past decades, theories on the consistency of the SAA solutions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-21 Wuwenqing Yan , Yongchao Liu