Related papers: Natural Gradient VI: Guarantees for Non-Conjugate …
We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…
Inference for GP models with non-Gaussian noises is computationally expensive when dealing with large datasets. Many recent inference methods approximate the posterior distribution with a simpler distribution defined on a small number of…
It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…
A systematic approach to finding variational approximation in an otherwise intractable non-conjugate model is to exploit the general principle of convex duality by minorizing the marginal likelihood that renders the problem tractable. While…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…
Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows…
We propose a variant of the classical conditional gradient method for sparse inverse problems with differentiable measurement models. Such models arise in many practical problems including superresolution, time-series modeling, and matrix…
In this paper we consider a non-monotone (mixed) variational inequality model with (nonlinear) convex conic constraints. Through developing an equivalent Lagrangian function-like primal-dual saddle-point system for the VI model in question,…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
We consider the problem of sampling from a target distribution, which is \emph {not necessarily logconcave}, in the context of empirical risk minimization and stochastic optimization as presented in Raginsky et al. (2017). Non-asymptotic…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…
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…
Quantifying uncertainty in predictions or, more generally, estimating the posterior conditional distribution, is a core challenge in machine learning and statistics. We introduce Convex Nonparanormal Regression (CNR), a conditional…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…
Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…
We propose a novel approach to sequential Bayesian inference based on variational Bayes (VB). The key insight is that, in the online setting, we do not need to add the KL term to regularize to the prior (which comes from the posterior at…
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a…
We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…
We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…