12 accepted papers
Model selection in Gaussian processes scales prohibitively with the size of the training dataset, both in time and memory. While many approximations exist, all incur inevitable approximation error. Recent work accounts for this error in the form of computational uncertainty, which enables---at the c…
Training and inference in Gaussian processes (GPs) require solving linear systems with $n\times n$ kernel matrices. To address the prohibitive $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ time complexity, recent work has employed fast iterative methods, like conjugate gradients (CG). However, as datasets increase in magnitud…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the *stochastic* setting. We aim to lessen this gap and provide a b…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach for sample-efficient optimization of black-box objective functions. While BO has been successfully applied to a wide range of scientific applications, traditional approaches to single-objective BO only seek to find a single best solution. This can be…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for black-box variational inference (BBVI) with the reparameterization gradient. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain, bounded support, only optimizing for the scale, and such), our setup does not ne…
Understanding the gradient variance of black-box variational inference (BBVI) is a crucial step for establishing its convergence and developing algorithmic improvements. However, existing studies have yet to show that the gradient variance of BBVI satisfies the conditions used to study the convergen…
A recent development in Bayesian optimization is the use of local optimization strategies, which can deliver strong empirical performance on high-dimensional problems compared to traditional global strategies. The "folk wisdom" in the literature is that the focus on local optimization sidesteps the…
Variational Gaussian processes (GPs) approximate exact GP inference by using a small set of inducing points to form a sparse approximation of the true posterior, with the fidelity of the model increasing with additional inducing points. Although the approximation error in principle can be reduced th…
Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly, Bayesian optimization offers one solution -- we construct a proba…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have become one of the most popular generative modeling techniques in machine learning. In this work, we study the statistical and robust properties of GANs for Gaussian mean estimation under Huber’s contamination model, where an epsilon proportion of training…
Deep models, while being extremely flexible and accurate, are surprisingly vulnerable to “small, imperceptible” perturbations known as adversarial attacks. While the majority of existing attacks focus on measuring perturbations under the $\ell_p$ metric, Wasserstein distance, which takes geometry in…
In distributional reinforcement learning (RL), the estimated distribution of value functions model both the parametric and intrinsic uncertainties. We propose a novel and efficient exploration method for deep RL that has two components. The first is a decaying schedule to suppress the intrinsic unce…