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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Roberto Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based particle method for sampling from a target distribution, e.g., in generative modeling and Bayesian inference. SVGD does not require estimating the gradient of the log-density,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-10 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-26 Jackson Gorham , Anant Raj , Lester Mackey

In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Jinhui Bai , Andreas Christmann , Lei Shi

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-08 Nicole Mücke

In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-05 Simon Weissmann , Jakob Zech

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-10 Qiang Liu , Dilin Wang

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Wenbo Gong , Yingzhen Li , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a widely used kernel-based measure of discrepancy between probability measures. It is often employed in the scenario where a user has a collection of samples from a candidate probability measure and wishes…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-13 George Wynne , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Andrew B. Duncan

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a known stochastic iterative method popular for large-scale convex optimization problems due to its simple implementation and scalability. Some objectives, such as those found in complex-valued neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Natanael Alpay , Emeric Battaglia

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) measure the quality of a distributional approximation and can be computed even when the target density has an intractable normalizing constant. Notable applications include the diagnosis of approximate MCMC…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Heishiro Kanagawa , Alessandro Barp , Arthur Gretton , Lester Mackey

This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm called Entropy-SGD for training deep neural networks that is motivated by the local geometry of the energy landscape. Local extrema with low generalization error have a large proportion of…

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a score-based discrepancy widely used in goodness-of-fit tests. It can be applied even when the target distribution has an unknown normalising factor, such as in Bayesian analysis. We show theoretically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-06 Xing Liu , Andrew B. Duncan , Axel Gandy

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have established themselves as the go-to algorithms for large-scale machine learning problems with independent samples due to their generalization performance and intrinsic computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Hao Chen , Lili Zheng , Raed Al Kontar , Garvesh Raskutti

We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Alessandro Rudi , Francis Bach

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) have emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying goodness-of-fit over the last decade, featuring numerous successful applications. To the best of our knowledge, all existing KSD estimators with known rate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jose Cribeiro-Ramallo , Agnideep Aich , Florian Kalinke , Ashit Baran Aich , Zoltán Szabó

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic sampling algorithm that iteratively transports a set of particles to approximate given distributions, based on an efficient gradient-based update that guarantees to optimally…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Qiang Liu

The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Daniel Cortild , Lucas Ketels , Juan Peypouquet , Guillaume Garrigos

We explore the minimax optimality of goodness-of-fit tests on general domains using the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD). The KSD framework offers a flexible approach for goodness-of-fit testing, avoiding strong distributional…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-24 Omar Hagrass , Bharath Sriperumbudur , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in statistical and machine learning due to its computational and memory efficiency. Various averaging schemes have been proposed to accelerate the convergence of SGD in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-08 Ziyang Wei , Wanrong Zhu , Wei Biao Wu