{"paper":{"title":"Stein Variational Gradient Descent: A General Purpose Bayesian Inference Algorithm","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"stat.ML","authors_text":"Dilin Wang, Qiang Liu","submitted_at":"2016-08-16T03:24:20Z","abstract_excerpt":"We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of functional gradient descent that minimizes the KL divergence. Empirical studies are performed on various real world models and datasets, on which our method is competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods. The derivation of our method is based on a new theoretical result that connects the derivative of KL divergence under smooth transforms with Stein'"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1608.04471","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/1608.04471/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}