This short note reviews so-called Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) for multivariate Gaussians. The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is derived for several different parameterizations of Gaussians. Careful attention is paid to the symmetric nature of the covariance matrix when calculating derivatives. We show that there are some advantages to choosing a parameterization comprising the mean and inverse covariance matrix and provide a simple NGD update that accounts for the symmetric (and sparse) nature of the inverse covariance matrix.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
In this note, we establish a descent lemma for the population limit Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Method~(MSVGD). This descent lemma does not rely on the path information of MSVGD but rather on a simple assumption for the mirrored distribution $\nablaΨ_{\#}π\propto\exp(-V)$. Our analysis demonstrates that MSVGD can be applied to a broader class of constrained sampling problems with non-smooth $V$. We also investigate the complexity of the population limit MSVGD in terms of dimension $d$.
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely on iterated steepest descent steps with respect to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space norm. This construction leads to interacting particle systems, the mean-field limit of which is a gradient flow on the space of probability distributions equipped with a certain geometrical structure. We leverage this viewpoint to shed some light on the convergence properti…
Particle-based approximate Bayesian inference approaches such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combine the flexibility and convergence guarantees of sampling methods with the computational benefits of variational inference. In practice, SVGD relies on the choice of an appropriate kernel function, which impacts its ability to model the target distribution -- a challenging problem with only heuristic solutions. We propose Neural Variational Gradient Descent (NVGD), which is based on parameterizing the witness function of the Stein discrepancy by a deep neural network whose parameters…
LTCI, Télécom Paris（巴黎电信学院LTCI实验室）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）；SAMOVAR, Télécom SudParis（南巴黎电信学院SAMOVAR实验室）
This paper focuses on $α$-divergence minimisation methods for Variational Inference. More precisely, we are interested in algorithms optimising the mixture weights of any given mixture model, without any information on the underlying distribution of its mixture components parameters. The Power Descent, defined for all $α\neq 1$, is one such algorithm and we establish in our work the full proof of its convergence towards the optimal mixture weights when $α<1$. Since the $α$-divergence recovers the widely-used forward Kullback-Leibler when $α\to 1$, we then extend the Power Descent to the case $…
We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of functional gradient descent that minimizes the KL divergence. Empirical studies are performed on various real world models and datasets, on which our method is competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods. The derivation of our method is based on a new theoretical result that connects the derivative of KL divergence under smooth transforms with Stein'…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Preferred Networks；The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数理研究所）
We formalize an equivalence between two popular methods for Bayesian inference: Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and black-box variational inference (BBVI). In particular, we show that BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when the kernel is the neural tangent kernel. Furthermore, we interpret SVGD and BBVI as kernel gradient flows; we do this by leveraging the recent perspective that views SVGD as a gradient flow in the space of probability distributions and showing that BBVI naturally motivates a Riemannian structure on that space. We observe that kernel gradient flow also describes dy…
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 posterior and the variational approximation, we minimize a semi-discrete optimal transport divergence. The solution of the resulting optimal transport problem provides both a particle approximation and a set of optimal transportation densities that map each particle to a segment of…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D_{KL}\left(\cdot\midπ\right)$, where $π$ is the target distribution. In this work, we propose to enhance SVGD via the introduction of importance weights, which leads to a new method for which we coin the name $β$-SVGD. In the continuous time and infinite particles regime, the time for this flow to converge to the equilibrium distribution $π$, quantified by th…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $π\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient descent in the space of probability distributions on the KL divergence with respect to $π$, where the gradient is smoothed through a kernel integral operator. In this paper, we provide a novel finite time analysis for the SVGD algorithm. We provide a descent lemma establishing that the algorithm decreases the objective at each iteration, and rates of convergence …
Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University（斯坦福大学计算与数学工程研究所）；Management Science & Engineering, Stanford University（斯坦福大学管理科学与工程系）
This paper provides a unifying view of a wide range of problems of interest in machine learning by framing them as the minimization of functionals defined on the space of probability measures. In particular, we show that generative adversarial networks, variational inference, and actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning can all be seen through the lens of our framework. We then discuss a generic optimization algorithm for our formulation, called probability functional descent (PFD), and show how this algorithm recovers existing methods developed independently in the settings mentioned ea…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $π(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms and SVGD, the potential function $V$ is often assumed to be $L$-smooth. However, this restrictive condition excludes a large class of potential functions such as polynomials of degree greater than $2$. Our paper studies the convergence of the SVGD algorithm for distributions with $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth potentials. This relaxed smoothness assumption was introduced b…
A new method for learning variational autoencoders (VAEs) is developed, based on Stein variational gradient descent. A key advantage of this approach is that one need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder distribution. Performance is further enhanced by integrating the proposed encoder with importance sampling. Excellent performance is demonstrated across multiple unsupervised and semi-supervised problems, including semi-supervised analysis of the ImageNet data, demonstrating the scalability of the model to large datasets.
Finite-Particle Rates for Regularized Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Department of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院数学系）；Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校统计系）；Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校统计与运筹学系）；Department of Statistics, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学统计系）
Branching Stein Variational Gradient Descent for sampling multimodal distributions
) Kyoto University, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Japan；) Centro de Investigaci\'on en Matem\'aticas A.C., Department of Probability；) ETH Zurich, Department of Mathematics, Switzerland
We propose in this work RBM-SVGD, a stochastic version of Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method for efficiently sampling from a given probability measure and thus useful for Bayesian inference. The method is to apply the Random Batch Method (RBM) for interacting particle systems proposed by Jin et al to the interacting particle systems in SVGD. While keeping the behaviors of SVGD, it reduces the computational cost, especially when the interacting kernel has long range. Numerical examples verify the efficiency of this new version of SVGD.
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a particle-based inference algorithm that leverages gradient information for efficient approximate inference. In this work, we enhance SVGD by leveraging preconditioning matrices, such as the Hessian and Fisher information matrix, to incorporate geometric information into SVGD updates. We achieve this by presenting a generalization of SVGD that replaces the scalar-valued kernels in vanilla SVGD with more general matrix-valued kernels. This yields a significant extension of SVGD, and more importantly, allows us to flexibly incorporate various precond…
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences（奥登计算工程与科学研究所）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the fundamental property of intrinsic low dimensionality of the data informed subspace stemming from ill-posedness of such problems. We adaptively construct the subspace using a gradient information matrix of the log-likelihood, and apply pSVGD to the much lower-dimensional coefficients of the parameter projection. The method is demonstrated to be more accurate and effici…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic particle inference algorithm that provides an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. However, SVGD has been found to suffer from variance underestimation when the dimensionality of the target distribution is high. Recent developments have advocated projecting both the score function and the data onto real lines to sidestep this issue, although this can severely overestimate the epistemic (model) uncertainty. In this work, we propose Grassmann Stein variational gradient descent (GSVGD) as an alternative approach, which per…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Illinois（伊利诺伊大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Ecole Normale Supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）
Mirror descent, introduced by Nemirovski and Yudin in the 1970s, is a primal-dual convex optimization method that can be tailored to the geometry of the optimization problem at hand through the choice of a strongly convex potential function. It arises as a basic primitive in a variety of applications, including large-scale optimization, machine learning, and control. This paper proposes a variational formulation of mirror descent and of its stochastic variant, mirror Langevin dynamics. The main idea, inspired by the classic work of Brezis and Ekeland on variational principles for gradient flow…
Flexible regression methods where interest centres on the way that the whole distribution of a response vector changes with covariates are very useful in some applications. A recently developed technique in this regard uses the matrix-variate Dirichlet process as a prior for a mixing distribution on a coefficient in a multivariate linear regression model. The method is attractive, particularly in the multivariate setting, for the convenient way that it allows for borrowing strength across different component regressions and for its computational simplicity and tractability. The purpose of the …
Institute of Mathematics, Universität Potsdam（波茨坦大学数学研究所）；WIAS Berlin（柏林应用分析与随机学研究所）
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, each of which represent one of the two main paradigms in Bayesian computational statistics: variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo. As it turns out, these are tightly linked through a correspondence between gradient flow structures and large-deviation principles rooted in statistical physics. To expose this relationship, we develop the cotangent …
Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention in the approximate inference literature for its flexibility and accuracy. We empirically explore the ability of this method to sample from multi-modal distributions and focus on two important issues: (i) the inability of the particles to escape from local modes and (ii) the inefficacy in reproducing the density of the different regions. We propose an annealin…
Bosch-Delta Lab（博世-德尔塔实验室）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
We focus on the problem of efficient sampling and learning of probability densities by incorporating symmetries in probabilistic models. We first introduce Equivariant Stein Variational Gradient Descent algorithm -- an equivariant sampling method based on Stein's identity for sampling from densities with symmetries. Equivariant SVGD explicitly incorporates symmetry information in a density through equivariant kernels which makes the resultant sampler efficient both in terms of sample complexity and the quality of generated samples. Subsequently, we define equivariant energy based models to mod…
This paper introduces Distributed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (DSVGD), a non-parametric generalized Bayesian inference framework for federated learning. DSVGD maintains a number of non-random and interacting particles at a central server to represent the current iterate of the model global posterior. The particles are iteratively downloaded and updated by one of the agents with the end goal of minimizing the global free energy. By varying the number of particles, DSVGD enables a flexible trade-off between per-iteration communication load and number of communication rounds. DSVGD is show…
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the target distribution of interest. For example, such a sequence of distributions is given by a hierarchy of ever finer discretization levels of the forward model in Bayesian inverse problems. The proposed multilevel Stein variational gradient descent moves most of the iterations to lower, cheaper levels with the aim of requiring only a few iterations on the higher…
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 estimated by any set of particles that satisfies the fixed point equation of SVGD. This set is the image of Stein operator applied on the feature maps of the positive definite kernel used in SVGD. Our results provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the properties of SVGD wi…
Bayesian Deep Learning for Remaining Useful Life Estimation via Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science（吉娜·科迪工程与计算机科学学院）；Università degli Studi di Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Mila-Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）
School of Information Science and Technology（信息科学与技术学院）；College of Mathematics and Statistics（数学与统计学院）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
Computer Science, Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院计算机科学（系））；Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校计算机科学（系））
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 of SVGD (GF-SVGD), which replaces the true gradient with a surrogate gradient, and corrects the induced bias by re-weighting the gradients in a proper form. We show that our GF-SVGD can be viewed as the standard SVGD with a special choice of kernel, and hence directly inherits th…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Sampling methods, as important inference and learning techniques, are typically designed for unconstrained domains. However, constraints are ubiquitous in machine learning problems, such as those on safety, fairness, robustness, and many other properties that must be satisfied to apply sampling results in real-life applications. Enforcing these constraints often leads to implicitly-defined manifolds, making efficient sampling with constraints very challenging. In this paper, we propose a new variational framework with a designed orthogonal-space gradient flow (O-Gradient) for sampling on a man…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the empirical performance. Radial basis function (RBF) kernel with median heuristics is a common choice in previous approaches, but unfortunately this has proven to be sub-optimal. Inspired by the paradigm of Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL), our solution to this flaw is using a combination of multiple kernels to approximate the optimal kernel, rather than a single o…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average potential over the posterior distribution of weights along with an entropic regularization term. This potential is however not the original loss function in general. So SGD does perform variational inference, but for a different loss than the one used to compute the gradients. Even more surprisingly, SGD does not even converge in the classical sense: we show …
Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局生物信息学研究所）；Huaiyin Normal University（淮阴师范学院）；Nanjing Normal University（南京师范大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs), famous for the capability of learning complex underlying data distribution, are however known to be tricky in the training process, which would probably result in mode collapse or performance deterioration. Current approaches of dealing with GANs' issues almost utilize some practical training techniques for the purpose of regularization, which on the other hand undermines the convergence and theoretical soundness of GAN. In this paper, we propose to stabilize GAN training via a novel particle-based variational inference -- Langevin Stein variational grad…
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 that particles of SVGD tend to collapse to modes of the target distribution, and this particle degeneracy phenomenon becomes more severe with higher dimensions. Our theoretical analysis finds out that there exists a negative correlation between the dimensionality and the repulsive …
The monotone variational inequality is a central problem in mathematical programming that unifies and generalizes many important settings such as smooth convex optimization, two-player zero-sum games, convex-concave saddle point problems, etc. The extragradient algorithm by Korpelevich [1976] and the optimistic gradient descent-ascent algorithm by Popov [1980] are arguably the two most classical and popular methods for solving monotone variational inequalities. Despite their long histories, the following major problem remains open. What is the last-iterate convergence rate of the extragradient…
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating Bayesian inference as an optimization problem and solving it using gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we argue in favor of natural-gradient approaches which, unlike their gradient-based counterparts, can improve convergence by exploiting the information geometry of the solutions. We show how to derive fast yet simple natural-gradient updates by using a …
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Ecological Forecasting and Remote Sensing Center（上海生态预测与遥感中心）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
We in this paper propose a realizable framework TECU, which embeds task-specific strategies into update schemes of coordinate descent, for optimizing multivariate non-convex problems with coupled objective functions. On one hand, TECU is capable of improving algorithm efficiencies through embedding productive numerical algorithms, for optimizing univariate sub-problems with nice properties. From the other side, it also augments probabilities to receive desired results, by embedding advanced techniques in optimizations of realistic tasks. Integrating both numerical algorithms and advanced techn…
ENS（巴黎高等师范学院）；Univ. PSL（巴黎文理研究大学）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔国立理工学院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Criteo AI Lab（Criteo人工智能实验室）
In this paper, we analyze the local convergence rate of optimistic mirror descent methods in stochastic variational inequalities, a class of optimization problems with important applications to learning theory and machine learning. Our analysis reveals an intricate relation between the algorithm's rate of convergence and the local geometry induced by the method's underlying Bregman function. We quantify this relation by means of the Legendre exponent, a notion that we introduce to measure the growth rate of the Bregman divergence relative to the ambient norm near a solution. We show that this …
Improved Finite-Particle Convergence Rates for Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill（统计与运筹学系，北卡罗来纳大学 Chapel Hill 分校）；Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis（统计系，加州大学 Davis 分校）；Department of Statistics, University of Chicago（统计系，芝加哥大学）
Gradient boosted trees are competition-winning, general-purpose, non-parametric regressors, which exploit sequential model fitting and gradient descent to minimize a specific loss function. The most popular implementations are tailored to univariate regression and classification tasks, precluding the possibility of capturing multivariate target cross-correlations and applying structured penalties to the predictions. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient algorithm for fitting multivariate boosted trees. We show that multivariate trees can outperform their univariate counterpart …
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient descent, using Monte Carlo approximation for the gradients. This enables variational inference for arbitrary differentiable probabilistic models, and consequently makes variational inference feasible for probabilistic programming languages. In this work we develop more efficient inference algorithms for the task by considering importance sampling estimates fo…
In this article, we consider modeling ranked responses from a heterogeneous population. Specifically, we analyze data from the Eurobarometer 34.1 survey regarding public policy preferences towards drugs, alcohol and AIDS. Such policy preferences are likely to exhibit substantial differences within as well as across European nations reflecting a wide variety of cultures, political affiliations, ideological perspectives and common practices. We use a mixed membership model to account for multiple subgroups with differing preferences and to allow each individual to possess partial membership in m…
