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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

169,051 papers · 148 categories

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48 results for SVGD

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.

Stein variational gradient decent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful approximate inference algorithm for complex distributions. However, the standard SVGD requires calculating the gradient of the target density and cannot be applied when the gradient is unavailable. In this work, we develop a gradient-free variant …

2018-06-07abs ↗pdf ↗

Gaussian-SVGD dynamics converge to Gaussian distributions under certain conditions.

problem Understanding the theoretical properties of SVGD, especially for Gaussian targets.
method Detailed theoretical study of Gaussian-SVGD dynamics, considering both mean-field PDE and discrete particle systems.
result Gaussian-SVGD dynamics converge linearly to the Gaussian distribution closest to the target in KL divergence.

Improves SVGD for high-dimensional Bayesian inference by reducing variance collapse.

problem Variance collapse in SVGD reduces accuracy and diversity of estimation.
method Augmented Message Passing SVGD (AUMP-SVGD) method, a two-stage optimization procedure.
result AUMP-SVGD achieves satisfactory accuracy and overcomes variance collapse in various benchmark problems.

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional variational inference and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. However, we observed th…

2017-11-13abs ↗pdf ↗

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a non-parametric inference algorithm that evolves a set of particles to fit a given distribution of interest. We analyze the non-asymptotic properties of SVGD, showing that there exists a set of functions, which we call the Stein matching set, whose expectations are exactly …

2018-10-27abs ↗pdf ↗

Bayesian neural network predicts cyclical time series with SVGD and reduced error.

problem Predicting cyclical time series data with calibrated uncertainties.
method Bayesian framework using SVGD to train a feed-forward DetNN.
result The BNN reduces average estimation error by 10% compared to MLP.

Paper analyzes SVGD algorithm for non-asymptotic convergence.

problem Optimizing a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution.
method Finite time analysis of SVGD algorithm, providing descent lemma and convergence rates.
result SVGD algorithm decreases the objective at each iteration and converges to the target distribution.

ASVGD accelerates SVGD for efficient sampling from Gaussian targets.

problem Efficient sampling from Gaussian distributions using SVGD.
method Accelerated gradient flow in a metric space of probability densities, including momentum and Wasserstein regularization.
result ASVGD achieves optimal convergence rate for Gaussian targets, independent of covariance.

SMI uses mixture models to improve SVGD's performance in Bayesian inference.

problem Variance collapse in SVGD for Bayesian inference, especially with small models.
method Generalizes SVGD to Stein mixture models, optimizing an ELBO lower bound.
result SMI avoids variance collapse and accurately estimates uncertainty for small BNNs.

This paper shows equivalence between SVGD and BBVI using kernel gradient flows.

problem Bayesian inference methods and their equivalence.
method Formalizes equivalence between SVGD and BBVI using kernel gradient flows.
result BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when using the neural tangent kernel.

A new method for stochastic optimization using virtual gradients.

problem Stochastic optimization challenges in computational efficiency and memory usage.
method Inspired by dynamic programming, SVGD uses a computational graph and automatic differentiation for efficient optimization.
result Experimental results show SVGD outperforms other methods on multiple datasets and network models.

We develop Riemannian Stein Variational Gradient Descent (RSVGD), a Bayesian inference method that generalizes Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to Riemann manifold. The benefits are two-folds: (i) for inference tasks in Euclidean spaces, RSVGD has the advantage over SVGD of utilizing information geometry, and …

2017-11-30abs ↗pdf ↗

Stein variational neural network ensembles improve diversity and uncertainty estimation.

problem Lack of proper Bayesian justification and diversity guarantees in deep neural network ensembles.
method Particle-based inference methods, specifically Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), operating in weight space, function space, and hybrid settings.
result SVGD methods improve diversity and uncertainty estimation, approaching the true Bayesian posterior more closely.

New method uses multiple kernels to improve SVGD performance.

problem Sub-optimal performance of single kernel in SVGD.
method Combines multiple kernels to approximate optimal kernel, using Kernelized Stein Discrepancy (KSD) and constructing Multiple Kernel SVGD (MK-SVGD).
result Consistently matches or outperforms competing methods in experiments.

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its approximation by implementing a form of functional gradient descent on a reprod…

2018-06-08abs ↗pdf ↗

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 decrease the KL divergence between our importance proposal and the target distributio…

2017-04-18abs ↗pdf ↗

A new method for SVGD reduces variance in high dimensions.

problem High-dimensional variance in SVGD.
method Grassmann Stein Variational Gradient Descent (GSVGD) projects onto arbitrary subspaces and uses coupled Grassmann-valued diffusion.
result GSVGD explores high-dimensional problems with intrinsic low-dimensional structure efficiently.

We propose a unifying view of two different Bayesian inference algorithms, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), leading to improved and efficient novel sampling schemes. We show that SVGD combined with a noise term can be framed as a multiple chain SG-MCM…

2018-11-30abs ↗pdf ↗

SVGD algorithm converges at rate 1/sqrt(log log n) for sub-Gaussian distributions.

problem Approximating a probability distribution with particles.
method Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) with finite particles and sub-Gaussian target distribution.
result SVGD achieves a convergence rate of 1/sqrt(log log n) for sub-Gaussian distributions.

Learning probability distributions on the weights of neural networks (NNs) has recently proven beneficial in many applications. Bayesian methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), offer an elegant framework to reason about NN model uncertainty. However, by assuming independent Gaussian priors for the i…

2017-12-30abs ↗pdf ↗

Stein transport improves Bayesian inference with faster convergence and reduced variance.

problem Efficiently approximating posterior distributions in Bayesian inference.
method A novel Bayesian inference method using Stein transport, which pushes particles along a curve of tempered distributions.
result Stein transport reaches posterior approximations faster and more accurately than Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD).

This study improves uncertainty estimation in FWI using SVGD with annealing and PCA.

problem Uncertainty quantification in FWI solutions.
method Annealed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combined with multi-scale strategy and PCA.
result Improved uncertainty estimation in FWI solutions.

Stein variational gradient descent improves inference in Gaussian process models.

problem Inference in Gaussian process models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes is computationally intensive and inaccurate with traditional methods.
method Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for non-parametric inference.
result SVGD monotonically decreases the Kullback-Leibler divergence from the sampling distribution to the true posterior.

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…

2017-11-29abs ↗pdf ↗

A method for efficient approximate inference on discrete distributions.

problem Applying SVGD to discrete distributions.
method Transforming discrete distributions to piecewise continuous distributions for SVGD application.
result Outperforms traditional algorithms and ensemble methods on discrete graphical models.

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 decrease the KL divergence within a function space. This paper develops the first th…

2017-04-25abs ↗pdf ↗

A new method for diverse Pareto solutions in multi-objective learning.

problem Maximizing diversity while maximizing hypervolume in Pareto solutions.
method Annealed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) with diverse gradient directions.
result SVH-MOL achieves superior performance in multi-objective and multi-task learning.

Paper explores SVGD for Bayesian inference, linking deterministic and stochastic dynamics.

problem Bayesian inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
method Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) with deterministic and stochastic dynamics.
result Identifies Stein-Fisher information as the leading order contribution in the long-time and many-particle regime.

We propose a novel distributed inference algorithm for continuous graphical models, by extending Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to leverage the Markov dependency structure of the distribution of interest. Our approach combines SVGD with a set of structured local kernel functions defined on the Markov blanket…

2017-11-20abs ↗pdf ↗

Improved sampling method using regularized Stein Variational Gradient Flow.

problem Improving the accuracy of sampling methods in machine learning.
method Proposed Regularized Stein Variational Gradient Flow to interpolate between SVGD and Wasserstein Gradient Flow.
result Established theoretical properties and provided preliminary numerical evidence of improved performance.

Sliced kernelized Stein discrepancy improves goodness-of-fit tests and model learning in high dimensions.

problem The curse-of-dimensionality in kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD).
method Sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable variants using optimal one-dimensional projections.
result Significantly outperforms KSD and baselines in goodness-of-fit tests and improves model learning.

Efficiently samples and learns densities with symmetries using equivariant methods.

problem Efficiently sampling and learning densities with symmetries.
method Equivariant Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) and equivariant energy based models.
result Improves and scales up training of energy based models.

The paper analyzes rates for a modified gradient descent method using Stein variational gradients.

problem Improving the accuracy of gradient descent methods for complex target distributions.
method Derives finite-particle rates for regularized Stein variational gradient descent (R-SVGD).
result Establishes explicit non-asymptotic bounds for time-averaged empirical measures.