arXiv Machine Learning

Even More Guarantees for Variational Inference in the Presence of Symmetries

arXiv:2604. 21407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When approximating an intractable density via variational inference (VI) the variational family is typically chosen as a simple parametric family that very likely does not contain the target.

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 13

Fine-Tuning Generative Models for Extreme Events via CVaR-Penalized Wasserstein Gradient Flows

arXiv:2608. 11544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose CVaR-penalized Generative Particle Algorithm (CVaR-GPA), a robust, tail-agnostic algorithm for fine-tuning generative models to learn heavy-tailed distributions and capture extreme events, requiring no prior knowledge or estimation of the target's tail characteristics.

By Thejani Gamage, Hyemin Gu, Zhizhen Zhang, Ziyu Chen, Markos Katsoulakis, Luc Rey-Bellet
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Expected free energy as an information constraint on the Bethe Lagrangian

The paper introduces a Bethe Lagrangian formulation of expected free energy (EFE) that preserves a Kullback–Leibler structure, enabling message‑passing inference. By imposing an information constraint—requiring the mutual information between future observations, states, and parameters given actions to be at least the entropy of the goal prior—the authors recover the standard EFE solution at a specific Karush‑Kuhn‑Tucker multiplier. They analyze how varying this multiplier transitions the agent’s epistemic drive through inactive, interior, and saturated regimes, and benchmark the constrained Bethe agent against EFE and Q‑MDP on three tasks.

By Wouter M. Kouw
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

Linear convergence of proximal descent schemes on the Wasserstein space

arXiv:2411. 15067v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate proximal descent methods, inspired by the minimizing movement scheme introduced by Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, for optimizing entropy-regularized functionals on the Wasserstein space.

By Razvan-Andrei Lascu, Mateusz B. Majka, David \v{S}i\v{s}ka, {\L}ukasz Szpruch
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606. 16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration.

By M. Berk Sahin, Ahmet Ege Tanriverdi, Behzad Sharif, Abolfazl Hashemi