Related papers: Semi-Implicit Variational Inference via Kernelized…
This work presents an approach for automating the discretization and approximation procedures in constructing digital representations of composites from Micro-CT images featuring intricate microstructures. The proposed method is guided by…
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…
Machine learning is capable of discriminating phases of matter, and finding associated phase transitions, directly from large data sets of raw state configurations. In the context of condensed matter physics, most progress in the field of…
Neural network has attracted great attention for a long time and many researchers are devoted to improve the effectiveness of neural network training algorithms. Though stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and other explicit gradient-based…
A brain computer interface (BCI) is a system which provides direct communication between the mind of a person and the outside world by using only brain activity (EEG). The event-related potential (ERP)-based BCI problem consists of a binary…
Motivated by the computation of the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) and the Bayesian posterior in statistics, this paper explores the problem of convex optimization over the space of all probability distributions. We…
Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…
We develop semiparametrically efficient inference for kernel measures of noise heterogeneity in additive noise models. In many applications, the regression function is estimated using flexible machine learning methods. Downstream procedures…
Semi-implicit distributions have shown great promise in variational inference and generative modeling. Hierarchical semi-implicit models, which stack multiple semi-implicit layers, enhance the expressiveness of semi-implicit distributions…
Inspired by the seminal work on Stein Variational Inference and Stein Variational Policy Gradient, we derived a method to generate samples from the posterior variational parameter distribution by \textit{explicitly} minimizing the KL…
This paper illustrates novel methods for nonstationary time series modeling along with their applications to selected problems in neuroscience. These methods are semi-parametric in that inferences are derived by combining sequential…
In many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems, the environment exhibits inherent symmetries that can be exploited to improve learning efficiency. This paper develops a theoretical and algorithmic framework for incorporating known…
$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…
Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
We study the problem of spectrum estimation from transmission data of a known phantom. The goal is to reconstruct an x-ray spectrum that can accurately model the x-ray transmission curves and reflects a realistic shape of the typical energy…
Training generative models to sample from unnormalized density functions is an important and challenging task in machine learning. Traditional training methods often rely on the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence due to its…
Conditional independence (CI) is central to causal inference, feature selection, and graphical modeling, yet it is untestable in many settings without additional assumptions. Existing CI tests often rely on restrictive structural…
Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…
Let $V_* : \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ be some (possibly non-convex) potential function, and consider the probability measure $\pi \propto e^{-V_*}$. When $\pi$ exhibits multiple modes, it is known that sampling techniques based on…