Related papers: Stability of Mean-Field Variational Inference
We provide convergence guarantees in Wasserstein distance for a variety of variance-reduction methods: SAGA Langevin diffusion, SVRG Langevin diffusion and control-variate underdamped Langevin diffusion. We analyze these methods under a…
In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…
In the context of non-convex optimization, we let the temperature of a Langevin diffusion to depend on the diffusion's own density function. The rationale is that the induced density captures to some extent the landscape imposed by the…
The recent growth in multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification has given rise to a large set of variance reduction techniques that leverage information from model ensembles to provide variance reduction for estimates of the statistics of a…
This paper introduces Wasserstein variational inference, a new form of approximate Bayesian inference based on optimal transport theory. Wasserstein variational inference uses a new family of divergences that includes both f-divergences and…
We propose a fundamental metric for measuring the distance between two distributions. This metric, referred to as the decision-focused (DF) divergence, is tailored to stochastic linear optimization problems in which the objective…
We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian inference in log-supermodular models. These models encompass regular pairwise MRFs with binary variables, but allow to capture high-order interactions, which are intractable for existing…
We consider Mc Kean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (MVSDEs), which are SDEs where the drift and diffusion coefficients depend not only on the state of the unknown process but also on its probability distribution. This type of SDEs…
Full--waveform inversion (FWI) is a method used to determine properties of the Earth from information on the surface. We use the squared Wasserstein distance (squared $W_2$ distance) as an objective function to invert for the velocity of…
This paper proposes a non-centered parameterization based infinite-dimensional mean-field variational inference (NCP-iMFVI) approach for solving the hierarchical Bayesian inverse problems. This method can generate available estimates from…
A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…
We study the complexity of sampling from the stationary distribution of a mean-field SDE, or equivalently, the complexity of minimizing a functional over the space of probability measures which includes an interaction term. Our main insight…
Variational inference is an approximation framework for Bayesian inference that seeks to improve quantified uncertainty in predictions by optimizing a simplified distribution over parameters to stand in for the full posterior. Capturing…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
We study the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$ on $\rset^d$ which has a density \wrt\ the Lebesgue measure known up to a normalization factor $x \mapsto \rme^{-U(x)} / \int_{\rset^d} \rme^{-U(y)} \rmd y$. We analyze…
As an example of the nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation, the mean field Langevin dynamics recently attracts attention due to its connection to (noisy) gradient descent on infinitely wide neural networks in the mean field regime, and hence the…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) with Gaussian mixture families offers a flexible approach for approximating complex posterior distributions without requiring gradients of the target density. However, standard numerical optimization…
In order to predict future performance of subsurface fluid reservoirs under possible operating scenarios, a dynamic, porous-medium flow simulation model must be tuned to include representative properties of the reservoir. Estimating…
Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…