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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as an important aspect of generative models, have received a lot of research interests and reached many successful applications. However, it is always a challenge to achieve the consistency between the…
Inference in discrete graphical models with variational methods is difficult because of the inability to re-parameterize gradients of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). Many sampling-based methods have been proposed for estimating these…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a widely used sampling algorithm that has been successfully applied in several areas of Machine Learning. SVGD operates by iteratively moving a set of interacting particles (which represent the…
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…
Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…
We derive finite-particle rates for the regularized Stein variational gradient descent (R-SVGD) algorithm introduced by He et al. (2024) that corrects the constant-order bias of the SVGD by applying a resolvent-type preconditioner to the…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Full waveform inversion is an ill-posed inverse problem whose solution non-uniqueness -- i.e., arising from band-limited, finite-aperture, noisy data -- calls for uncertainty quantification to avoid overconfident geological interpretations.…
In variational inference (VI), an approximation of the posterior distribution is selected from a family of distributions through numerical optimization. With the most common variational objective function, known as the evidence lower bound…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…
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…
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…
Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…
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…
Posterior distributions arising in ill-posed Bayesian inverse problems are often both analytically intractable and highly sensitive to parameters of the chosen prior family. We aim to understand the sensitivity of intractable posterior…
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the…
Stochastic gradient descent based algorithms are typically used as the general optimization tools for most deep learning models. A Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is a probabilistic generative model that can be stacked to construct deep…