Related papers: Branching Stein Variational Gradient Descent for s…
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…
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…
Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…
A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence…
Variational particle-based Bayesian learning methods have the advantage of not being limited by the bias affecting more conventional parametric techniques. This paper proposes to leverage the flexibility of non-parametric Bayesian…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based method for Bayesian inference. However, its convergence suffers from the variance collapse, which reduces the accuracy and diversity of the estimation. In this paper, we…
We propose a Stein variational gradient descent method to concurrently sparsify, train, and provide uncertainty quantification of a complexly parameterized model such as a neural network. It employs a graph reconciliation and condensation…
We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…
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 unifying view of two different Bayesian inference algorithms, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), leading to improved and efficient novel sampling schemes. We…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…
Approximate Bayesian inference estimates descriptors of an intractable target distribution - in essence, an optimization problem within a family of distributions. For example, Langevin dynamics (LD) extracts asymptotically exact samples…
We are interested in gradient-based Explicit Generative Modeling where samples can be derived from iterative gradient updates based on an estimate of the score function of the data distribution. Recent advances in Stochastic Gradient…
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…
This paper examines the spatial coverage optimization problem for multiple sensors in a known convex environment, where the coverage service of each sensor is heterogeneous and anisotropic. We introduce the Stein Coverage algorithm, a…
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…
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…
Multilevel Stein variational gradient descent is a method for particle-based variational inference that leverages hierarchies of surrogate target distributions with varying costs and fidelity to computationally speed up inference. The…