Efficiently Sampling Functions from Gaussian Process Posteriors
Imperial College London(伦敦帝国学院);St. Petersburg State University(圣彼得堡国立大学);St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Mathematical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences(俄罗斯科学院斯捷克洛夫数学研究所圣彼得堡分所);University College London(伦敦大学学院)
James T. Wilson, Viacheslav Borovitskiy, Alexander Terenin, Peter Mostowsky, Marc Peter Deisenroth
发表信息:
International Conference on Machine Learning, 2020
Gaussian processes are the gold standard for many real-world modeling problems, especially in cases where a model's success hinges upon its ability to faithfully represent predictive uncertainty. These problems typically exist as parts of larger frameworks, wherein quantities of interest are ultimately defined by integrating over posterior distributions. These quantities are frequently intractable, motivating the use of Monte Carlo methods. Despite substantial progress in scaling up Gaussian processes to large training sets, methods for accurately generating draws from their posterior distributions still scale cubically in the number of test locations. We identify a decomposition of Gaussian processes that naturally lends itself to scalable sampling by separating out the prior from the data. Building off of this factorization, we propose an easy-to-use and general-purpose approach for fast posterior sampling, which seamlessly pairs with sparse approximations to afford scalability both during training and at test time. In a series of experiments designed to test competing sampling schemes' statistical properties and practical ramifications, we demonstrate how decoupled sample paths accurately represent Gaussian process posteriors at a fraction of the usual cost.
University of Oxford(牛津大学);The Alan Turing Institute(艾伦·图灵研究所)
Increasingly complex datasets pose a number of challenges for Bayesian inference. Conventional posterior sampling based on Markov chain Monte Carlo can be too computationally intensive, is serial in nature and mixes poorly between posterior modes. Further, all models are misspecified, which brings into question the validity of the conventional Bayesian update. We present a scalable Bayesian nonparametric learning routine that enables posterior sampling through the optimization of suitably randomized objective functions. A Dirichlet process prior on the unknown data distribution accounts for mo…
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Posterior Sampling with Denoising Oracles via Tilted Transport
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University(纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所);Center for Data Science, New York University(纽约大学数据科学中心);Flatiron Institute(弗莱堡研究所)
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Queensland University of Technology(昆士兰科技大学);University of Alberta(阿尔伯塔大学)
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Mila – Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute(米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所);Université de Montréal(蒙特利尔大学);Ciela Institute(谢拉研究所);CCA – Flatiron Institute(计算天体物理学中心-弗拉蒂伦研究所);Cavendish Laboratory(卡文迪什实验室);Kavli Institute for Cosmology(卡夫利宇宙学研究所);Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge(剑桥大学冈维尔与凯斯学院);Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)(加拿大高等研究院)
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University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);Google Research(谷歌研究院)
We introduce repriorisation, a data-dependent reparameterisation which transforms a Bayesian neural network (BNN) posterior to a distribution whose KL divergence to the BNN prior vanishes as layer widths grow. The repriorisation map acts directly on parameters, and its analytic simplicity complements the known neural network Gaussian process (NNGP) behaviour of wide BNNs in function space. Exploiting the repriorisation, we develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) posterior sampling algorithm which mixes faster the wider the BNN. This contrasts with the typically poor performance of MCMC in hi…
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Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, USA(华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校电气与系统工程系);Computer Science Department, ENS, PSL University, 75005, France(巴黎高等师范学院计算机科学系);MAP5, CNRS, Université Paris Cité, 75006, France(巴黎城市大学MAP5研究所);Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, USA(华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校计算机科学与工程系)
In this work we define a unified mathematical framework to deepen our understanding of the role of stochastic gradient (SG) noise on the behavior of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling (SGMCMC) algorithms. Our formulation unlocks the design of a novel, practical approach to posterior sampling, which makes the SG noise isotropic using a fixed learning rate that we determine analytically, and that requires weaker assumptions than existing algorithms. In contrast, the common traits of existing \sgmcmc algorithms is to approximate the isotropy condition either by drowning the gradients in additive n…
Duke University(杜克大学);Adobe Research(Adobe研究(Adobe Research));SUNY at Buffalo(纽约州立大学布法罗分校(SUNY at Buffalo))
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University of Lille(里尔大学);Harvard University(哈佛大学);Chalmers University of Technology(查尔姆斯理工大学);Google, Inc.(谷歌公司);The University of Melbourne(墨尔本大学)
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ZJU-UIUC Institute(ZJU-UIUC联合学院);Zhejiang University(浙江大学);School of Information Science and Technology(信息科学与技术学院);Tsinghua University(清华大学);Institute for Physics of Intelligence(智能物理研究所);The University of Tokyo(东京大学)
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can avoid repeated samples and those that are close to each other. This is the idea behind deterministic sampling methods such as Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC). However, the existing QMC methods aim at sampling from a uniform hypercube, which can miss the high probability regions of the posterior distribution and thus the approximation can be poor. Minimum energy design …
Posterior sampling via Langevin dynamics based on generative priors
Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University(普渡大学埃尔莫尔家族电气与计算机工程学院);H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology(佐治亚理工学院H·米尔顿·斯图尔特工业与系统工程学院);Department of Mathematics, Duke University(杜克大学数学系);Department of Physics and Department of Chemistry, Duke University(杜克大学物理系与化学系)
California Institute of Technology(加州理工学院);Tsinghua University(清华大学)
In preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), an agent interacts with the environment while receiving preferences instead of absolute feedback. While there is increasing research activity in preference-based RL, the design of formal frameworks that admit tractable theoretical analysis remains an open challenge. Building upon ideas from preference-based bandit learning and posterior sampling in RL, we present DUELING POSTERIOR SAMPLING (DPS), which employs preference-based posterior sampling to learn both the system dynamics and the underlying utility function that governs the preference fee…
Bayesian methods of sampling from a posterior distribution are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to precisely display the uncertainty of a model fit. Classical methods based on iterative random sampling and posterior evaluation such as Metropolis-Hastings are known to have desirable long run mixing properties, however are slow to converge. Gradient based methods, such as Langevin Dynamics (and its stochastic gradient counterpart) exhibit favorable dimension-dependence and fast mixing times for log-concave, and "close" to log-concave distributions, however also have long escape…
Posterior Sampling for Competitive RL: Function Approximation and Partial Observation
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);New York University(纽约大学);Peking University(北京大学);Northwestern University(西北大学);Yale University(耶鲁大学)
We present a randomized maximum a posteriori (rMAP) method for generating approximate samples of posteriors in high dimensional Bayesian inverse problems governed by large-scale forward problems. We derive the rMAP approach by: 1) casting the problem of computing the MAP point as a stochastic optimization problem; 2) interchanging optimization and expectation; and 3) approximating the expectation with a Monte Carlo method. For a specific randomized data and prior mean, rMAP reduces to the maximum likelihood approach (RML). It can also be viewed as an iterative stochastic Newton method. An anal…
A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin(德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校奥登计算工程与科学研究所);Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)(三菱电机研究实验室);Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin(德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校生物医学工程系);Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories(三菱电机研究实验室)
It is well known that the Lasso can be interpreted as a Bayesian posterior mode estimate with a Laplacian prior. Obtaining samples from the full posterior distribution, the Bayesian Lasso, confers major advantages in performance as compared to having only the Lasso point estimate. Traditionally, the Bayesian Lasso is implemented via Gibbs sampling methods which suffer from lack of scalability, unknown convergence rates, and generation of samples that are necessarily correlated. We provide a measure transport approach to generate i.i.d samples from the posterior by constructing a transport map …
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Poisson log-linear models are ubiquitous in many applications, and one of the most popular approaches for parametric count regression. In the Bayesian context, however, there are no sufficient specific computational tools for efficient sampling from the posterior distribution of parameters, and standard algorithms, such as random walk Metropolis-Hastings or Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithms, are typically used. Herein, we developed an efficient Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and importance sampler to simulate from the posterior distribution of the parameters of Poisson log-linear models under …
In real-world Bayesian inference applications, prior assumptions regarding the parameters of interest may be unrepresentative of their actual values for a given dataset. In particular, if the likelihood is concentrated far out in the wings of the assumed prior distribution, this can lead to extremely inefficient exploration of the resulting posterior by nested sampling algorithms, with unnecessarily high associated computational costs. Simple solutions such as broadening the prior range in such cases might not be appropriate or possible in real-world applications, for example when one wishes t…