Related papers: Stochastic Gradient Variational Inference with Pri…
Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
Traditional approaches to variational inference rely on parametric families of variational distributions, with the choice of family playing a critical role in determining the accuracy of the resulting posterior approximation. Simple…
Gaussian distributions are widely used in Bayesian variational inference to approximate intractable posterior densities, but the ability to accommodate skewness can improve approximation accuracy significantly, when data or prior…
We derive first-order (in the stepsize) bounds on the bias in Wasserstein distances of the invariant measure of stochastic gradient kinetic Langevin dynamics with minimal assumptions on the stochastic gradient noise. These bounds sharpen…
Optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions of discrete (and potentially continuous) design parameters is a ubiquitous problem in scientific and engineering applications. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular, sample-efficient…
We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…
Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…
We introduce local expectation gradients which is a general purpose stochastic variational inference algorithm for constructing stochastic gradients through sampling from the variational distribution. This algorithm divides the problem of…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) refers to a class of methods for Bayesian inference based on interacting particle systems. In this paper, we consider the originally proposed deterministic dynamics as well as a stochastic variant,…
Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…
Recently, optimization on the Riemannian manifold have provided valuable insights to the optimization community. In this regard, extending these methods to to the Wasserstein space is of particular interest, since optimization on…
Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…
Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…
We propose an approach based on function evaluations and Bayesian inference to extract higher-order differential information of objective functions {from a given ensemble of particles}. Pointwise evaluation $\{V(x^i)\}_i$ of some potential…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…