arXiv subjects

Christian J. Walder

Publications and source records attributed to Christian J. Walder.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

New Tricks for Estimating Gradients of Expectations

We introduce a family of pairwise stochastic gradient estimators for gradients of expectations, which are related to the log-derivative trick, but involve pairwise interactions between samples. The simplest example of our new estimator, dubbed the fundamental trick estimator, is shown to arise from either a) introducing and approximating an integral representation based on the fundamental theorem of calculus, or b) applying the reparameterisation trick to an implicit parameterisation under infinitesimal perturbation of the parameters. From the former perspective we generalise to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space representation, giving rise to a locality parameter in the pairwise interactions mentioned above, yielding our representer trick estimator. The resulting estimators are unbiased and shown to offer an independent component of useful information in comparison with the log-derivative estimator. We provide a further novel theoretical analysis which further characterises the variance reduction afforded by the new techniques. Promising analytical and numerical examples confirm the theory and intuitions behind the new estimators.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Quantile Propagation for Wasserstein-Approximate Gaussian Processes

Approximate inference techniques are the cornerstone of probabilistic methods based on Gaussian process priors. Despite this, most work approximately optimizes standard divergence measures such as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which lack the basic desiderata for the task at hand, while chiefly offering merely technical convenience. We develop a new approximate inference method for Gaussian process models which overcomes the technical challenges arising from abandoning these convenient divergences. Our method---dubbed Quantile Propagation (QP)---is similar to expectation propagation (EP) but minimizes the $L_2$ Wasserstein distance (WD) instead of the KL divergence. The WD exhibits all the required properties of a distance metric, while respecting the geometry of the underlying sample space. We show that QP matches quantile functions rather than moments as in EP and has the same mean update but a smaller variance update than EP, thereby alleviating EP's tendency to over-estimate posterior variances. Crucially, despite the significant complexity of dealing with the WD, QP has the same favorable locality property as EP, and thereby admits an efficient algorithm. Experiments on classification and Poisson regression show that QP outperforms both EP and variational Bayes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Neural Dynamic Programming for Musical Self Similarity

We present a neural sequence model designed specifically for symbolic music. The model is based on a learned edit distance mechanism which generalises a classic recursion from computer sci- ence, leading to a neural dynamic program. Re- peated motifs are detected by learning the transfor- mations between them. We represent the arising computational dependencies using a novel data structure, the edit tree; this perspective suggests natural approximations which afford the scaling up of our otherwise cubic time algorithm. We demonstrate our model on real and synthetic data; in all cases it out-performs a strong stacked long short-term memory benchmark.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

Fast Bayesian Intensity Estimation for the Permanental Process

The Cox process is a stochastic process which generalises the Poisson process by letting the underlying intensity function itself be a stochastic process. In this paper we present a fast Bayesian inference scheme for the permanental process, a Cox process under which the square root of the intensity is a Gaussian process. In particular we exploit connections with reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, to derive efficient approximate Bayesian inference algorithms based on the Laplace approximation to the predictive distribution and marginal likelihood. We obtain a simple algorithm which we apply to toy and real-world problems, obtaining orders of magnitude speed improvements over previous work.

stat.ME↗