Related papers: Bures-Wasserstein Importance-Weighted Evidence Low…
We present and study a novel algorithm for the computation of 2-Wasserstein population barycenters of absolutely continuous probability measures on Euclidean space. The proposed method can be seen as a stochastic gradient descent procedure…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has become a powerful framework for estimation under uncertainty, offering strong out-of-sample performance and principled regularization. In this paper, we propose a DRO-based method for linear…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) has been widely applied to optimize expensive black-box functions while retaining sample efficiency. However, scaling BO to high-dimensional spaces remains challenging. Existing literature proposes performing…
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…
Minimizing functionals in the space of probability distributions can be done with Wasserstein gradient flows. To solve them numerically, a possible approach is to rely on the Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto (JKO) scheme which is analogous to the…
This paper focuses on the contextual optimization problem where a decision is subject to some uncertain parameters and covariates that have some predictive power on those parameters are available before the decision is made. More…
Gaussian Process regression is a kernel method successfully adopted in many real-life applications. Recently, there is a growing interest on extending this method to non-Euclidean input spaces, like the one considered in this paper,…
Recent work in unsupervised representation learning has focused on learning deep directed latent-variable models. Fitting these models by maximizing the marginal likelihood or evidence is typically intractable, thus a common approximation…
A method for analyzing non-asymptotic guarantees of numerical discretizations of ergodic SDEs in Wasserstein-2 distance is presented by Sanz-Serna and Zygalakis in ``Wasserstein distance estimates for the distributions of numerical…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
In his classical argument, Rao derives the Riemannian distance corresponding to the Fisher metric using a mapping between the space of positive measures and Euclidean space. He obtains the Hellinger distance on the full space of measures…
Survey data often arises from complex sampling designs, such as stratified or multistage sampling, with unequal inclusion probabilities. When sampling is informative, traditional inference methods yield biased estimators and poor coverage.…
The quantum Wasserstein distance (W-distance) is a fundamental metric for quantifying the distinguishability of quantum operations, with critical applications in quantum error correction. However, computing the W-distance remains…
The sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance has been widely recognized as a statistically effective and computationally efficient metric between two probability measures. A key component of the SW distance is the slicing distribution. There are…
The central objective function of a variational autoencoder (VAE) is its variational lower bound (the ELBO). Here we show that for standard (i.e., Gaussian) VAEs the ELBO converges to a value given by the sum of three entropies: the…
Optimal transport is a foundational problem in optimization, that allows to compare probability distributions while taking into account geometric aspects. Its optimal objective value, the Wasserstein distance, provides an important loss…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled self-improving AI systems that iteratively generate, evaluate, and refine their outcomes. Recent studies show that prompt-optimization-based self-improvement can outperform state-of-the-art…
We study portfolio selection with a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) constraint under distribution shift and serial dependence. While Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (DRO) offers tractable protection via an ambiguity ball…