Related papers: The Polynomial Stein Discrepancy for Assessing Mom…
We provide finite-particle convergence rates for the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm in the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy ($\mathsf{KSD}$) and Wasserstein-2 metrics. Our key insight is that the time derivative of the…
We present a new method for evaluating and training unnormalized density models. Our approach only requires access to the gradient of the unnormalized model's log-density. We estimate the Stein discrepancy between the data density $p(x)$…
Bias evaluation is fundamental to trustworthy AI, both in terms of checking data quality and in terms of checking the outputs of AI systems. In testing data quality, for example, one may study the distance of a given dataset, viewed as a…
Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…
Local polynomial density (LPD) estimators are widely used for inference on boundary features of the density function. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show that kernel choice substantially affects efficiency. Theory, simulations, and…
Estimating truncated density models is difficult, as these models have intractable normalising constants and hard to satisfy boundary conditions. Score matching can be adapted to solve the truncated density estimation problem, but requires…
We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…
We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of…
In this work, we revisit the problem of estimating the mean and covariance of an unknown $d$-dimensional Gaussian distribution in the presence of an $\varepsilon$-fraction of adversarial outliers. The pioneering work of [DKK+16] gave a…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the…
We propose a stochastic variant of the classical Polyak step-size (Polyak, 1987) commonly used in the subgradient method. Although computing the Polyak step-size requires knowledge of the optimal function values, this information is readily…
Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…
The Stein Variational Gradient Descent method is a variational inference method in statistics that has recently received a lot of attention. The method provides a deterministic approximation of the target distribution, by introducing a…
This article provides a practical introduction to kernel discrepancies, focusing on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), and the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD). Various estimators for these…
With the aim of generalizing histogram statistics to higher dimensional cases, density estimation via discrepancy based sequential partition (DSP) has been proposed to learn an adaptive piecewise constant approximation defined on a binary…
We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient…
We develop a multidimensional Stein methodology for non-degenerate self-decomposable random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ having finite first moment. Building on previous univariate findings, we solve an integro-partial differential Stein…