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.
Log-density gradient estimation is a fundamental statistical problem and possesses various practical applications such as clustering and measuring non-Gaussianity. A naive two-step approach of first estimating the density and then taking its log-gradient is unreliable because an accurate density estimate does not neces…
We consider the problem of sampling from a strongly log-concave density in Rd, and prove an information theoretic lower bound on the number of stochastic gradient queries of the log density needed. Several popular sampling algorithms (including many Markov chain Monte Carlo methods) operate by using stochas…
Mean shift clustering finds the modes of the data probability density by identifying the zero points of the density gradient. Since it does not require to fix the number of clusters in advance, the mean shift has been a popular clustering algorithm in various application fields. A typical implementation of the mean shi…
Modal regression is aimed at estimating the global mode (i.e., global maximum) of the conditional density function of the output variable given input variables, and has led to regression methods robust against heavy-tailed or skewed noises. The conditional mode is often estimated through maximization of the modal regre…
Non-Gaussian component analysis (NGCA) is aimed at identifying a linear subspace such that the projected data follows a non-Gaussian distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel NGCA algorithm based on log-density gradient estimation. Unlike existing methods, the proposed NGCA algorithm identifies the linear subspac…
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.
Study on sample complexity of policy gradient for stabilizing linear systems under multiplicative noise.
problem Learning optimal feedback gain for stabilizing linear systems with multiplicative noise.
method Analyzes the sample complexity of policy gradient methods, addressing the cusp obstruction and using symmetry to control divergent parts of the gradient.
result Proves that projected mini-batch policy gradient attains total sample complexity of O(1/η) when noise density is known and O(η^(-(2s+1)/(2s))) when estimated, for C^s noise densities with s ≥ 2.
In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly overdamped) Langevin diffusion and establish guarantees on its error measured in the W…
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is understood mainly in the setting of smooth (gradient-Lipschitz) log-densities, a seri…
Flow-based generative models parameterize probability distributions through an invertible transformation and can be trained by maximum likelihood. Invertible residual networks provide a flexible family of transformations where only Lipschitz conditions rather than strict architectural constraints are needed for enforci…
Recently, some works have suggested methods to combine variational probabilistic inference with Monte Carlo sampling. One promising approach is via local optimal transport. In this approach, a gradient steepest descent method based on local optimal transport principles is formulated to transform deterministically point…
In the field of optimal transport theory, an optimal map is known to be a gradient map of a potential function satisfying cost-convexity. In this paper, the Jacobian determinant of a gradient map is shown to be log-concave with respect to a convex combination of the potential functions when the underlying manifold is t…
The reparameterization trick is widely used in variational inference as it yields more accurate estimates of the gradient of the variational objective than alternative approaches such as the score function method. Although there is overwhelming empirical evidence in the literature showing its success, there is relative…
As an important Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) algorithm has achieved great success in Bayesian learning and posterior sampling. However, SGLD typically suffers from slow convergence rate due to its large variance caused by the stochastic gradient. In order to allev…
We examine the vertical component of surface area in the warped product of a Euclidean interval and a fiber manifold with product density. We determine general conditions under which vertical fibers minimize vertical surface area among regions bounding the same volume and use these results to conclude that in many such…
The kernel exponential family is a rich class of distributions, which can be fit efficiently and with statistical guarantees by score matching. Being required to choose a priori a simple kernel such as the Gaussian, however, limits its practical applicability. We provide a scheme for learning a kernel parameterized by …
We completely characterize isoperimetric regions in R^n with density e^h, where h is convex, smooth, and radially symmetric. In particular, balls around the origin constitute isoperimetric regions of any given volume, proving the Log-Convex Density Conjecture due to Kenneth Brakke.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the image domain. However, GANs are limited in two ways. They often learn distributions with low support---a phenomenon known as mode collapse---and they do not guarantee the exist…