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In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a distribution under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Prior works measure the utility of DP sampling with density ratio-based measures such as KL divergence. However, such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Shokichi Takakura , Seng Pei Liew , Satoshi Hasegawa

The analysis of samples of random objects that do not lie in a vector space is gaining increasing attention in statistics. An important class of such object data is univariate probability measures defined on the real line. Adopting the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-07 Yaqing Chen , Zhenhua Lin , Hans-Georg Müller

Wasserstein gradient flow has emerged as a promising approach to solve optimization problems over the space of probability distributions. A recent trend is to use the well-known JKO scheme in combination with input convex neural networks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Jiaojiao Fan , Qinsheng Zhang , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

Wasserstein GAN(WGAN) is a model that minimizes the Wasserstein distance between a data distribution and sample distribution. Recent studies have proposed stabilizing the training process for the WGAN and implementing the Lipschitz…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Cheolhyeong Kim , Seungtae Park , Hyung Ju Hwang

Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Hoang Phan , Ngoc Tran , Trung Le , Toan Tran , Nhat Ho , Dinh Phung

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

Wasserstein distances define a metric between probability measures on arbitrary metric spaces, including meta-measures (measures over measures). The resulting Wasserstein over Wasserstein (WoW) distance is a powerful, but computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Moritz Piening , Robert Beinert

We obtain an improved finite-sample guarantee on the linear convergence of stochastic gradient descent for smooth and strongly convex objectives, improving from a quadratic dependence on the conditioning $(L/\mu)^2$ (where $L$ is a bound on…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-01-19 Deanna Needell , Nathan Srebro , Rachel Ward

We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-05 Anna Korba , Adil Salim , Michael Arbel , Giulia Luise , Arthur Gretton

Particle-based variational inference offers a flexible way of approximating complex posterior distributions with a set of particles. In this paper we introduce a new particle-based variational inference method based on the theory of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-16 Luca Ambrogioni , Umut Guclu , Marcel van Gerven

Dataset Distillation (DD) aims to generate a compact synthetic dataset that enables models to achieve performance comparable to training on the full large dataset, significantly reducing computational costs. Drawing from optimal transport…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Haoyang Liu , Yijiang Li , Tiancheng Xing , Peiran Wang , Vibhu Dalal , Luwei Li , Jingrui He , Haohan Wang

We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Yiheng Jiang , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

Stream stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and efficient method for solving online optimization problems in operations research (OR), where data is generated by parameter-dependent Markov chains. Unlike traditional approaches…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Xiang Li , Jiadong Liang , Xinyun Chen , Zhihua Zhang

We study the contraction in Wasserstein distance of the coordinate ascent variational inference algorithm. This is shown to hold under a transport-information inequality at the fixed points and a functional smoothness condition. The results…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-29 Rocco Caprio , Adrien Corenflos , Sam Power

Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

Approximating a probability distribution using a set of particles is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics, with applications including clustering and quantization. Formally, we seek a weighted mixture of Dirac measures…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 Ayoub Belhadji , Daniel Sharp , Youssef Marzouk

This paper presents a theoretical framework for the design and analysis of gradient descent-based algorithms for coverage control tasks involving robot swarms. We adopt a multiscale approach to analysis and design to ensure consistency of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-08 Vishaal Krishnan , Sonia Martínez

We propose a novel approach to the problem of multilevel clustering, which aims to simultaneously partition data in each group and discover grouping patterns among groups in a potentially large hierarchically structured corpus of data. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-26 Viet Huynh , Nhat Ho , Nhan Dam , XuanLong Nguyen , Mikhail Yurochkin , Hung Bui , and Dinh Phung

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