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.
An important task in computational statistics and machine learning is to approximate a posterior distribution p(x) with an empirical measure supported on a set of representative points {xi}i=1n. This paper focuses on methods where the selection of points is essentially deterministic, with an emphasis on achi…
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 …
There is an intrinsic notion of what it means for a contact manifold to be the smooth boundary of a Stein manifold. The same concept has another more extrinsic formulation, which is often used as a convenient working hypothesis. We give a simple proof that the two are equivalent. Moreover it is shown that, even though …
Approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) offers the promise of more rapid sampling at the cost of more biased inference. Since standard MCMC diagnostics fail to detect these biases, researchers have developed computable Stein discrepancy measures that provably determine the convergence of a sample to its target dist…
We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of Kreck's modified surgery. As an application, we show that any simply connected a…
In this paper we survey results on the existence of holomorphic embeddings and immersions of Stein manifolds into complex manifolds. Most results pertain to proper maps into Stein manifolds. We include a new result saying that every continuous map X→Y between Stein manifolds is homotopic to a proper holomorphic em…
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…
We show that, under a certain condition, contact 5-manifolds can `coarsely' distinguish smooth structures on compact Stein 4-manifolds via contact open books. We also give a simple sufficient condition for an infinite family of Stein 4-manifolds to have an infinite subfamily of pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein 4-manifo…
We give an algorithm which produces infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein fillings of the same contact 3-manifolds, applying positive allowable Lefschetz fibrations over the disk. As a corollary, for a large class of Stein fillings, we realize the topological invariants (i.e. fundamental group, homology group, homology…
In Bayesian inference, the posterior distributions are difficult to obtain analytically for complex models such as neural networks. Variational inference usually uses a parametric distribution for approximation, from which we can easily draw samples. Recently discrete approximation by particles has attracted attention …
For any integer n≥2, we construct an infinite family of Stein fillable contact (4n−1)-manifolds each of which admits infinitely many pairwise homotopy inequivalent Stein fillings.
We continue our study of contact structures on manifolds of dimension at least five using complex surgery theory. We show that in each dimension 2q+1 > 3 there are 'maximal' almost contact manifolds to which there is a Stein cobordism from any other (2q+1)-dimensional contact manifold. We show that the product M x S^2 …
We characterize the closed, oriented, Seifert fibered 3-manifolds which are oriented boundaries of Stein manifolds. We also show that for this class of 3-manifolds the existence of Stein fillings is equivalent to the existence of symplectic fillings.
A unified summary is given of the existence theory of Stein manifolds in all dimensions, based on published and pending literature. Eliashberg's characterization of manifolds admitting Stein structures requires an extra delicate hypothesis in complex dimension 2, which can be eliminated by passing to the topological se…