Accelerating Particle-based Energetic Variational Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bao, Xuelian, Kang, Lulu, Liu, Chun, Wang, Yiwei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bao, Xuelian
Kang, Lulu
Liu, Chun
Wang, Yiwei
author_facet Bao, Xuelian
Kang, Lulu
Liu, Chun
Wang, Yiwei
contents In this work, we propose a new particle-based variational inference (ParVI) method for accelerating the Energetic Variational Inference with Implicit scheme (EVI-Im) introduced in Ref. \cite{wang2021particle}. Inspired by energy quadratization (EQ) and operator splitting techniques for gradient flows, the proposed method efficiently drives particles towards the target distribution, while retaining a meaningful stability mechanism. Unlike EVI-Im, which employs the implicit Euler method to solve variational-preserving particle dynamics obtained from a "discretization-then-variation" approach for minimizing the Kullback--Leibler divergence, the proposed algorithm avoids repeated evaluation of inter-particle interaction terms within each time step, significantly reducing computational cost. The framework is also extensible to other gradient-based sampling techniques. Through several numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared with existing ParVI approaches, while offering advantages in efficiency and robustness in certain regimes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_03158
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating Particle-based Energetic Variational Inference
Bao, Xuelian
Kang, Lulu
Liu, Chun
Wang, Yiwei
Machine Learning
62G05, 65K10, 65L05
In this work, we propose a new particle-based variational inference (ParVI) method for accelerating the Energetic Variational Inference with Implicit scheme (EVI-Im) introduced in Ref. \cite{wang2021particle}. Inspired by energy quadratization (EQ) and operator splitting techniques for gradient flows, the proposed method efficiently drives particles towards the target distribution, while retaining a meaningful stability mechanism. Unlike EVI-Im, which employs the implicit Euler method to solve variational-preserving particle dynamics obtained from a "discretization-then-variation" approach for minimizing the Kullback--Leibler divergence, the proposed algorithm avoids repeated evaluation of inter-particle interaction terms within each time step, significantly reducing computational cost. The framework is also extensible to other gradient-based sampling techniques. Through several numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared with existing ParVI approaches, while offering advantages in efficiency and robustness in certain regimes.
title Accelerating Particle-based Energetic Variational Inference
topic Machine Learning
62G05, 65K10, 65L05
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03158