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We consider the primal and dual forms of the optimality conditions for PDE-contrained optimization problems arising in Data-Driven Computational Mechanics when specialized to the reaction-diffusion context. Starting with the continuous…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-24 Ramon Codina , Roberto Federico Ausas , Pedro Balbão Bazon , Cristian Guillermo Gebhardt

We reconsider the stochastic (sub)gradient approach to the unconstrained primal L1-SVM optimization. We observe that if the learning rate is inversely proportional to the number of steps, i.e., the number of times any training pattern is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-01-28 Constantinos Panagiotakopoulos , Petroula Tsampouka

Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hippolyte Labarrière , Cesare Molinari , Silvia Villa , Lorenzo Rosasco

Yang et al. (2023) recently showed how to use first-order gradient methods to solve general variational inequalities (VIs) under a limiting assumption that analytic solutions of specific subproblems are available. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-06 Tatjana Chavdarova , Tong Yang , Matteo Pagliardini , Michael I. Jordan

Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Adji B. Dieng , Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , John Paisley , David M. Blei

Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Minta Liu , Suliang Bu

Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Bohan Wu , David Blei

Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-25 Saikat Banerjee , Peter Carbonetto , Matthew Stephens

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Manushi Welandawe , Michael Riis Andersen , Aki Vehtari , Jonathan H. Huggins

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-15 Alp Kucukelbir , Rajesh Ranganath , Andrew Gelman , David M. Blei

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

Random feature latent variable models (RFLVMs) represent the state-of-the-art in latent variable models, capable of handling non-Gaussian likelihoods and effectively uncovering patterns in high-dimensional data. However, their heavy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Ying Li , Zhidi Lin , Yuhao Liu , Michael Minyi Zhang , Pablo M. Olmos , Petar M. Djurić

While Variational Inequality (VI) is a well-established mathematical framework that subsumes Nash equilibrium and saddle-point problems, less is known about its extension, Quasi-Variational Inequalities (QVI). QVI allows for cases where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Zeinab Alizadeh , Afrooz Jalilzadeh

The differential stochastic variational inequality with parametric convex optimization (DSVI-O) is an ordinary differential equation whose right-hand side involves a stochastic variational inequality and solutions of several dynamic and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Xiaojun Chen , Jian Guo , Guan Wang

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have gained attention in the Bayesian inference literature, for their capacity to yield flexible and accurate approximations. We explore ParVIs from the perspective of Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-17 Chang Liu , Jingwei Zhuo , Pengyu Cheng , Ruiyi Zhang , Jun Zhu , Lawrence Carin

We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Wasu Top Piriyakulkij , Yingheng Wang , Volodymyr Kuleshov

We consider Bayesian variable selection for binary outcomes under a probit link with a spike-and-slab prior on the regression coefficients. Motivated by the computational challenges encountered by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers in…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-18 Augusto Fasano , Giovanni Rebaudo

We study Concave Constrained Markov Decision Processes (Concave CMDPs) where both the objective and constraints are defined as concave functions of the state-action occupancy measure. We propose the Variance-Reduced Primal-Dual Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Donghao Ying , Mengzi Amy Guo , Hyunin Lee , Yuhao Ding , Javad Lavaei , Zuo-Jun Max Shen

We study the numerical approximation of a time-dependent variational mean field game system with local couplings and either periodic or Neumann boundary conditions. Following a variational approach, we employ a finite difference…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-01-06 Heidi Wolles Ljósheim , Dante Kalise , John W. Pearson , Francisco J. Silva

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-26 Yash Patel , Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier , Ambuj Tewari