Related papers: A Trust-Region Method for Graphical Stein Variatio…
We consider trust-region methods for solving optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function and a nonsmooth, convex regularizer. We extend the global convergence theory of such methods to include…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
In this paper, we present a flow-based method for global optimization of continuous Sobolev functions, called Stein Boltzmann Sampling (SBS). SBS initializes uniformly a number of particles representing candidate solutions, then uses the…
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…
Simulation-based Bayesian inference (SBI) methods are widely used for parameter estimation in complex models where evaluating the likelihood is challenging but generating simulations is relatively straightforward. However, these methods…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…
Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the…
Simulation-based inference (SBI) provides a powerful framework for inferring posterior distributions of stochastic simulators in a wide range of domains. In many settings, however, the posterior distribution is not the end goal itself --…
This paper is concerned with the approximation of probability distributions known up to normalization constants, with a focus on Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in scientific computing. In this context, key challenges…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…
Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…
Bayesian inference for doubly intractable distributions is challenging because they include intractable terms, which are functions of parameters of interest. Although several alternatives have been developed for such models, they are…
We develop EigenVI, an eigenvalue-based approach for black-box variational inference (BBVI). EigenVI constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions. For distributions over $\mathbb{R}^D$, the lowest order term…
In this paper, we study statistical inference for the Wasserstein distance, which has attracted much attention and has been applied to various machine learning tasks. Several studies have been proposed in the literature, but almost all of…
Manifold optimization has recently gained significant attention due to its wide range of applications in various areas. This paper introduces the first Riemannian trust region method for minimizing an SC$^1$ function, which is a…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…
Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…
We propose in this work RBM-SVGD, a stochastic version of Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method for efficiently sampling from a given probability measure and thus useful for Bayesian inference. The method is to apply the Random…
Neural simulation-based inference (SBI) is a popular set of methods for Bayesian inference when models are only available in the form of a simulator. These methods are widely used in the sciences and engineering, where writing down a…