New method approximates POMDPs with PB-MDPs, providing error bounds and practical algorithms.
problem Difficulty in solving POMDPs with continuous or hybrid state and observation spaces.
method Bounding particle filtering error and adapting MDP algorithms to POMDPs.
result General theory and practical algorithms for POMDPs with no direct dependence on state and observation space sizes.
We propose an original particle-based implementation of the Loopy Belief Propagation (LPB) algorithm for pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRF) on a continuous state space. The algorithm constructs adaptively efficient proposal distributions approximating the local beliefs at each note of the MRF. This is achieved by cons…
NBF combines deep learning with classical filtering for better belief tracking.
problem Maintaining distributions over hidden states in partially observable systems.
method Trains neural networks to map beliefs to fixed-length vectors, updating them with incoming observations and dynamics.
result NBF efficiently tracks shifting, multimodal beliefs without particle impoverishment.
DPFRL uses particle filters for decision making with complex visual observations.
problem Decision making with partial complex visual observations.
method Discriminative Particle Filter Reinforcement Learning (DPFRL) with a differentiable particle filter in the neural network policy.
result DPFRL outperforms state-of-the-art POMDP RL models in complex visual observation tasks.
This work studies the problem of stochastic dynamic filtering and state propagation with complex beliefs. The main contribution is GP-SUM, a filtering algorithm tailored to dynamic systems and observation models expressed as Gaussian Processes (GP), and to states represented as a weighted sum of Gaussians. The key attr…
This paper presents a solution for persistent monitoring of real-world stochastic phenomena, where the underlying covariance structure changes sharply across time, using a small number of mobile robot sensors. We propose an adaptive solution for the problem where stochastic real-world dynamics are modeled as a Gaussian…
Deep belief networks can approximate any multivariate density with binary hidden units.
problem Approximating multivariate probability densities with binary hidden units.
method Sharp quantitative bounds on approximation error in terms of hidden units.
result Deep belief networks can approximate any multivariate density with binary hidden units under mild integrability requirements.
This thesis investigates belief propagation's performance in graphical models with loops.
problem Belief propagation's performance and convergence guarantees in models with loops are uncertain.
method Investigates how model parameters affect belief propagation's performance, convergence, and approximation quality.
result Model parameters influence the number of fixed points, convergence properties, and approximation quality of belief propagation.
Paper uses averaging from many particle filters to approximate posterior predictive distributions.
problem Approximating posterior predictive distributions efficiently and accurately.
method Particle swarm filter algorithm that averages many particle filter approximations.
result Law of large numbers and central limit theorem support the method's effectiveness.
Improved particle approximation for mean-field neural networks.
problem Particle approximation error for mean-field neural networks.
method Improved particle approximation error by leveraging the problem structure in risk minimization.
result Established an LSI-constant-free particle approximation error concerning the objective gap.
Optimal weights improve particle-based approximations of discrete distributions.
problem Improving particle-based approximations of discrete distributions.
method Proving optimality of weights and showing how to compute them efficiently.
result Optimal weights can be computed from existing particle-based methods without extra costs.
Study links cognitive effort to thermodynamic principles, optimizing decision-making.
problem Understanding the energy cost of decision-making in living systems.
method Applied Landauer's principle to analyze belief dynamics in a two-armed bandit game.
result Cognitive energy cost correlates with optimal decision-making outcomes.
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 semi-discrete optimal transport. Instead of minimizing the KL divergence between the po…
Surprise-based learning allows agents to rapidly adapt to non-stationary stochastic environments characterized by sudden changes. We show that exact Bayesian inference in a hierarchical model gives rise to a surprise-modulated trade-off between forgetting old observations and integrating them with the new ones. The mod…
New α-BP algorithm improves belief propagation for graphs with loops.
problem Uncertainty in belief propagation for graphs with loops.
method Derive α-BP algorithm motivated by minimizing α-divergence. result Proves convergence conditions for α-BP. Study shows rate of convergence for particle approximation of PDEs in Wasserstein space.
problem Analyzing convergence rates for particle approximations of PDEs in Wasserstein space.
method Backward stochastic differential equations techniques.
result Proved a rate of convergence of order 1/N for pathwise error and 1/sqrt(N) for L2-error on the derivative.
New method improves Euler approximation for local stochastic volatility models.
problem Well-posedness of Euler approximation for local stochastic volatility models.
method Start with a well-defined Euler approximation to the formal McKean-Vlasov equation, followed by a half-step scheme.
result Showed weak order one for the Euler discretization, plus error terms.
Recurrent networks learn beliefs from history in partially observable environments.
problem Learning optimal policies in partially observable environments.
method Trained recurrent neural networks to approximate value functions, measuring mutual information between hidden states and beliefs.
result Recurrent networks' hidden states correlate with beliefs of relevant state variables, improving expected return.
Two SVGD variants achieve fast convergence with provable guarantees.
problem Understanding and improving SVGD's performance with finite particles.
method Introducing virtual particles and novel stochastic approximations.
result Provable fast convergence rates for finite-particle SVGD variants.
A new EVI framework improves ParVI methods by maintaining variational structure and reducing KL-divergence.
problem Improving variational inference methods for better approximation of target distributions.
method EVI framework that minimizes the VI objective function based on an energy-dissipation law, including a new 'Approximation-then-Variation' scheme.
result The new scheme significantly decreases KL-divergence and outperforms existing ParVI methods in fidelity.
We present a joint message passing approach that combines belief propagation and the mean field approximation. Our analysis is based on the region-based free energy approximation method proposed by Yedidia et al. We show that the message passing fixed-point equations obtained with this combination correspond to station…
A new particle algorithm improves mean-field variational inference.
problem Efficiently approximating nonparametric posterior distributions in machine learning.
method Introduces PArticle VI (PAVI), a novel particle-based algorithm for nonparametric mean-field approximation.
result Obtains non-asymptotic error bounds for PArticle VI, providing the first end-to-end guarantee for particle-based MFVI.
A multi-layer deep Gaussian process (DGP) model is a hierarchical composition of GP models with a greater expressive power. Exact DGP inference is intractable, which has motivated the recent development of deterministic and stochastic approximation methods. Unfortunately, the deterministic approximation methods yield a…
We present the particle stochastic approximation EM (PSAEM) algorithm for learning of dynamical systems. The method builds on the EM algorithm, an iterative procedure for maximum likelihood inference in latent variable models. By combining stochastic approximation EM and particle Gibbs with ancestor sampling (PGAS), PS…
Transformers approximate mean-field dynamics of indistinguishable particles.
problem Approximating the dynamics of indistinguishable particles in complex systems.
method Using transformers to model the mean-field dynamics of interacting particle systems.
result Theoretical bounds on the distance between true and transformer-obtained mean-field dynamics.
Factor graphs are important models for succinctly representing probability distributions in machine learning, coding theory, and statistical physics. Several computational problems, such as computing marginals and partition functions, arise naturally when working with factor graphs. Belief propagation is a widely deplo…
Paper formulates particle flow using variational inference and Fisher-Rao gradient flow.
problem Estimating posterior densities in probabilistic models.
method Variational formulation of particle flow, Fisher-Rao gradient flow, Gaussian and Gaussian mixture approximations.
result Gaussian and Gaussian mixture approximations of Fisher-Rao particle flow reduce to Exact Daum and Huang particle flow under linear Gaussian assumptions.
A new stochastic algorithm approximates optimal distributions without requiring propagation of chaos.
problem Optimizing functionals over probability distributions using finite particle systems.
method Virtual particle stochastic approximation, viewed as a form of stochastic gradient descent in the Wasserstein space.
result The algorithm's output converges to the optimal distribution and produces i.i.d. samples.
We generalize recent theoretical work on the minimal number of layers of narrow deep belief networks that can approximate any probability distribution on the states of their visible units arbitrarily well. We relax the setting of binary units (Sutskever and Hinton, 2008; Le Roux and Bengio, 2008, 2010; Montúfar and Ay,…
Belief propagation (BP) can do exact inference in loop-free graphs, but its performance could be poor in graphs with loops, and the understanding of its solution is limited. This work gives an interpretable belief propagation rule that is actually minimization of a localized α-divergence. We term this algorithm as $α…
The paper tackles approximate unlearning from a subset of training data using variational inference.
problem Unlearning from a small subset of erased training data while maintaining the posterior belief from the full data.
method Formulates unlearning as minimizing KL divergence, equivalent to minimizing an evidence upper bound. Uses variational inference to approximate posterior beliefs and proposes two tricks to handle challenges.
result Demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed unlearning methods on various Bayesian models.
Deep FPF approximates gain function for high-dimensional particle filtering.
problem Approximating the exact gain function in high-dimensional settings.
method Represent the gain function as a neural network gradient and solve a variational Poisson equation via optimization.
result The approach allows parallel processing of particles and is applicable to high-dimensional problems.
Bayesian inference for neural networks improves uncertainty quantification.
problem Improving predictive uncertainty in neural networks.
method Ensemble Kalman filter extensions and interacting particle systems.
result Effective methods for quantifying predictive uncertainty in neural networks.
This work develops a particle system to approximate Fisher-Rao gradient flows in mean-field optimization.
problem Optimizing probability measures in neural network contexts.
method Constructing an interacting particle system approximating Fisher-Rao gradient flows.
result Propagation of chaos for the Fisher-Rao gradient flow in entropic mean-field optimization.
Electrostatics method samples complex distributions deterministically.
problem Sampling and inference of complex, high-dimensional distributions.
method Electrostatics-based particle system with Newton mechanics principles.
result Method achieves comparable performance to other methods in benchmark tasks.
There has been recent interest in developing scalable Bayesian sampling methods such as stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for big-data analysis. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discrete-time Markov chain to approximate a target distribution, thus samp…
A number of problems in statistical physics and computer science can be expressed as the computation of marginal probabilities over a Markov random field. Belief propagation, an iterative message-passing algorithm, computes exactly such marginals when the underlying graph is a tree. But it has gained its popularity as …
SIFG uses noisy particles to efficiently sample from complex distributions.
problem Efficient sampling from complex distributions using particle-based methods.
method SIFG introduces a semi-implicit functional gradient flow with Gaussian noise to improve sampling efficiency and accuracy.
result SIFG achieves strong theoretical convergence guarantees and efficient sampling.
Improved error correction using neural networks and belief propagation.
problem Inference in factor graphs with loops or poor approximations.
method Hybrid model combining FG-GNN and belief propagation.
result Hybrid model outperforms belief propagation in error correction tasks.
New algorithm trains latent diffusion models using interacting particles.
problem Training latent diffusion models efficiently and accurately.
method Reformulate training as minimizing a free energy functional, then approximate with interacting particles.
result The new algorithm outperforms previous methods in experiments.
New sampling-based approach for filtering problems using multiplicative Gaussian functions.
problem Approximate inference in filtering problems.
method Approximates distribution with a weighted sum of continuous functions using sampling for multiplications.
result Preliminary experiments show potential of the new method compared to particle filters.
Bayesian methods are appealing in their flexibility in modeling complex data and ability in capturing uncertainty in parameters. However, when Bayes' rule does not result in tractable closed-form, most approximate inference algorithms lack either scalability or rigorous guarantees. To tackle this challenge, we propose …
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain to approximate a target distribution. However, the samples are typically highly correl…
Study validates numerical method for singular FBSDEs convergence.
problem Solving singular FBSDEs and associated PDEs.
method Particles approximation for transport operator and tree approximation for diffusion operator.
result Convergence rate of numerical method proved under reasonable conditions.
pRSL combines probabilistic rules to improve multi-label classification.
problem Modeling the structure between multi-label classes for better performance.
method Uses probabilistic propositional logic rules and belief propagation to combine predictions from multiple classifiers.
result pRSL achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.
This paper optimizes functions of probability measures using particle gradient descent for displacement convex functions.
problem Optimizing functions of probability measures with displacement convex properties.
method Particle gradient descent applied to displacement convex functions with theoretical guarantees.
result Finite number of particles and computations are sufficient to find optimal solutions for displacement convex functions.
FORBES learns flexible belief states for POMDPs using normalizing flows.
problem Accurately modeling belief states in POMDPs for high-dimensional, continuous spaces.
method Integrates normalizing flows into variational inference for continuous belief state learning.
result FORBES learns flexible belief states that enable multi-modal predictions and high-quality reconstructions.
Study on convergence of Langevin dynamics for zero-sum games in probability distributions.
problem Analyzing convergence of Langevin dynamics for zero-sum games in probability distributions.
method Proved exponential and biased convergence guarantees for mean-field and finite-particle min-max Langevin dynamics.
result Explicit iteration complexity for finite-particle algorithms to approximate equilibrium distributions.