arXiv Machine Learning

Geometry-Aware Block Selection for Sparse Variational Gaussian Processes

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Feature Space Adaptation for Effortless Gaussian Process Flows

The paper introduces improvements to FlowGP, a method for conditional sampling from Gaussian processes outside the linear-Gaussian regime. It adds kernel approximations to scale to high-resolution domains and a new technique for computing marginal likelihood by measuring the work required to steer diffusion toward conditioning statements. These advances enable hyperparameter optimisation within FlowGP and are demonstrated on tasks such as probabilistic downscaling, PDE solution inference on irregular domains, and sea level anomaly field recovery from non-Gaussian satellite data.

By Thomas Cowperthwaite, Louis Sharrock, Lachlan Astfalck, Henry Moss
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A Generalized Tangent Approximation based Variational Inference Framework for Strongly Super-Gaussian Likelihoods

The paper introduces a new variational inference framework that uses tangent transformations to handle strongly super‑Gaussian likelihoods across a wide range of probability models. By constructing tangent minorants of the log‑likelihood through convex duality, the method achieves conjugacy with Gaussian priors, enabling tractable inference where traditional approaches struggle. The authors provide algorithmic convergence guarantees and near‑parametric risk bounds, and demonstrate superior scalability and accuracy on both simulated and real‑world datasets compared to existing variational algorithms.

By Somjit Roy, Pritam Dey, Debdeep Pati, Bani K. Mallick
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

A Flexible Empirical Bayes Approach to Generalized Linear Models, with Applications to Sparse Logistic Regression

The paper presents a tuning‑free empirical Bayes framework for Bayesian generalized linear models that uses a novel mean‑field variational inference algorithm. By estimating the prior within the VI procedure and optimizing the posterior mean directly, the method reduces optimization complexity and supports scalable solvers like L‑BFGS and stochastic gradient descent. Applied to sparse logistic regression, the approach shows superior predictive performance compared to existing methods.

By Dongyue Xie, Matthew Stephens
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

gp2Scale: A Class of Compactly Supported Non-Stationary Kernels and Distributed Computing for Exact Gaussian Processes on 10 Million Data Points

arXiv:2512. 06143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite a large corpus of recent work on scaling up Gaussian processes, a stubborn trade-off between computational speed, prediction and uncertainty quantification accuracy, and customizability persists.

By Marcus M. Noack, Mark D. Risser, Hengrui Luo, Vardaan Tekriwal, Ronald J. Pandolfi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Gradient-based Sample Selection for Faster Bayesian Optimization

The paper introduces Gradient-based Sample Selection Bayesian Optimization (GSSBO), a method that builds the Gaussian process surrogate on a strategically chosen subset of samples rather than the full dataset. By using gradient information to eliminate redundant points while keeping diversity and representativeness, GSSBO achieves sublinear regret bounds and reduces the cubic computational cost of standard BO. Experiments on synthetic and real-world tasks show that this approach maintains comparable optimization performance while significantly cutting GP fitting time and resource usage.

By Qiyu Wei, Haowei Wang, Zirui Cao, Songhao Wang, Richard Allmendinger, Mauricio A \'Alvarez