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Related papers: Functional Gradient Flows for Constrained Sampling

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The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-21 Soumyadip Ghosh , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki , Edith Zhang

We propose a control barrier function (CBF) formulation for enforcing equality and inequality constraints in variational inference. The key idea is to define a barrier functional on the space of probability density functions that encode the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Yinzhuang Yi , Jorge Cortés , Nikolay Atanasov

The motivation for this paper stems from the desire to develop an adaptive sampling method for solving constrained optimization problems in which the objective function is stochastic and the constraints are deterministic. The method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-01 Yuchen Xie , Raghu Bollapragada , Richard Byrd , Jorge Nocedal

We present a method for conditional sampling for pre-trained normalizing flows when only part of an observation is available. We derive a lower bound to the conditioning variable log-probability using Schur complement properties in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-18 Vincent Moens , Aivar Sootla , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Dinghuai Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen , Cheng-Hao Liu , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-15 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Reza Babanezhad , Wu Lin , Mark Schmidt , Masashi Sugiyama

We propose the Value Gradient Sampler (VGS), a diffusion sampler parameterized by value functions. VGS generates samples from an unnormalized target density (i.e., energy) by evolving randomly initialized particles along the gradient of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Himchan Hwang , Hyeokju Jeong , Dong Kyu Shin , Che-Sang Park , Sehee Kweon , Sangwoong Yoon , Frank Chongwoo Park

We develop subgradient- and gradient-based methods for minimizing strongly convex functions under a notion which generalizes the standard Euclidean strong convexity. We propose a unifying framework for subgradient methods which yields two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-19 Masaru Ito

One of the most popular approaches for solving total variation-regularized optimization problems in the space of measures are Particle Gradient Flows (PGFs). These restrict the problem to linear combinations of Dirac deltas and then perform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Christian Amend , Marcello Carioni , Konstantinos Zemas

Recent years witnessed the development of powerful generative models based on flows, diffusion or autoregressive neural networks, achieving remarkable success in generating data from examples with applications in a broad range of areas. A…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-07-22 Davide Ghio , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Generative models excel at synthesizing high-fidelity samples from complex data distributions, but they often violate hard constraints arising from physical laws or task specifications. A common remedy is to project intermediate samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jinhao Liang , Yixuan Sun , Anirban Samaddar , Sandeep Madireddy , Ferdinando Fioretto

Methods for inference and simulation of linearly constrained Gaussian Markov Random Fields (GMRF) are computationally prohibitive when the number of constraints is large. In some cases, such as for intrinsic GMRFs, they may even be…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-04 David Bolin , Jonas Wallin

Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Weilin Cong , Rana Forsati , Mahmut Kandemir , Mehrdad Mahdavi

The scarcity of labeled data is a long-standing challenge for many machine learning tasks. We propose our gradient flow method to leverage the existing dataset (i.e., source) to generate new samples that are close to the dataset of interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Xinru Hua , Truyen Nguyen , Tam Le , Jose Blanchet , Viet Anh Nguyen

Image segmentation is the process of partitioning the image into significant regions easier to analyze. Nowadays, segmentation has become a necessity in many practical medical imaging methods as locating tumors and diseases. Hidden Markov…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-14 EL-Hachemi Guerrout , Samy Ait-Aoudia , Dominique Michelucci , Ramdane Mahiou

We consider stochastic approximations which arise from such applications as data communications and image processing. We demonstrate why constraints are needed in a stochastic approximation and how a constrained approximation can be…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-09-01 Hong Jiang , Gang Huang , Paul Wilford , Liangkai Yu

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-04 Van Chien Ta , Thi Mai Hong Chu , Minh-Ngoc Tran

Mathematical Programs with Vanishing Constraints (MPVCs) are a notoriously challenging class of problems owing to their lack of constraint qualification. Therefore, to tackle these problems, relaxation-based approaches are typically used.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-02 Christoph Hansknecht , Julian Niederer , Andreas Potschka

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-26 Mathieu Even