Semi-Implicit Functional Gradient Flow for Efficient Sampling
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) use nonparametric variational families represented by particles to approximate the target distribution according to the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although functional gradient flows have been introduced to expand the kernel space for better flexibility, the deterministic updating mechanism may limit exploration and require expensive repetitive runs for new samples. In this paper, we propose Semi-Implicit Functional Gradient flow (SIFG), a functional gradient ParVI method that uses perturbed particles with Gaussian noise as the approximation family. We show that the corresponding functional gradient flow, which can be estimated via denoising score matching with neural networks, exhibits strong theoretical convergence guarantees due to a higher-order smoothness brought to the approximation family via Gaussian perturbation. In addition, we present an adaptive version of our method that automatically selects the appropriate noise magnitude during sampling, striking a good balance between exploration efficiency and approximation accuracy. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
DenoisingVariational InferenceMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Implicit Bias of the JKO Scheme
Wasserstein gradient flow provides a general framework for minimizing an energy functional $J$ over the space of probability measures on a Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$. Its canonical time-discretization, the Jordan-Kinder…
Particle Semi-Implicit Variational Inference
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods …
Variational InferenceSemi-discrete optimization through semi-discrete optimal transport: a framework for neural architecture search
In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework for semi-discrete optimization using ideas from optimal transport. Our primary motivation is in the field of deep learning, and specifically in the task of neural archit…
Neural Architecture SearchFunctional Gradient Flows for Constrained Sampling
Recently, through a unified gradient flow perspective of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have been proposed that tend to combine the b…
Variational InferenceProbing Implicit Bias in Semi-gradient Q-learning: Visualizing the Effective Loss Landscapes via the Fokker--Planck Equation
Semi-gradient Q-learning is applied in many fields, but due to the absence of an explicit loss function, studying its dynamics and implicit bias in the parameter space is challenging. This paper introduces the Fokker--Pl…
Q-Learning