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Alain Durmus

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44 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Mixture-Based Framework for Guiding Diffusion Models

Yazid Janati
Badr Moufad
Mehdi Abou El Qassime
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines
Jimmy Olsson

Denoising diffusion models have driven significant progress in the field of Bayesian inverse problems. Recent approaches use pre-trained diffusion models as priors to solve a wide range of such problems, only leveraging inference-time compute and thereby eliminating the need to retrain task-specific models on the same dataset. To approximate the posterior of a Bayesian inverse problem, a diffusion model samples from a sequence of intermediate posterior distributions, each with an intractable likelihood function. This work proposes a novel mixture approximation of these intermediate distributions. Since direct gradient-based sampling of these mixtures is infeasible due to intractable terms, we propose a practical method based on Gibbs sampling. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on image inverse problems, utilizing both pixel- and latent-space diffusion priors, as well as on source separation with an audio diffusion model. The code is available at https: //www. github. com/badr-moufad/mgdm.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Algorithm- and Data-Dependent Generalization Bounds for Diffusion Models

Benjamin Dupuis
Dario Shariatian
Maxime Haddouche
Alain Durmus
Umut Simsekli

Score-based generative models (SGMs) have emerged as one of the most popular classes of generative models. A substantial body of work now exists on the analysis of SGMs, focusing either on discretization aspects or on their statistical performance. In the latter case, bounds have been derived, under various metrics, between the true data distribution and the distribution induced by the SGM, often demonstrating polynomial convergence rates with respect to the number of training samples. However, these approaches adopt a largely approximation theory viewpoint, which tends to be overly pessimistic and relatively coarse. In particular, they fail to fully explain the empirical success of SGMs or capture the role of the optimization algorithm used in practice to train the score network. To support this observation, we first present simple experiments illustrating the concrete impact of optimization hyperparameters on the generalization ability of the generated distribution. Then, this paper aims to bridge this theoretical gap by providing the first algorithmic- and data-dependent generalization analysis for SGMs. In particular, we establish bounds that explicitly account for the optimization dynamics of the learning algorithm, offering new insights into the generalization behavior of SGMs. Our theoretical findings are supported by empirical results on several datasets.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Differential Privacy Guarantees of Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms

Andrea Bertazzi
Tim Johnston
Gareth O. Roberts
Alain Durmus

This paper aims to provide differential privacy (DP) guarantees for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In a first part, we establish DP guarantees on samples output by MCMC algorithms as well as Monte Carlo estimators associated with these methods under assumptions on the convergence properties of the underlying Markov chain. In particular, our results highlight the critical condition of ensuring the target distribution is differentially private itself. In a second part, we specialise our analysis to the unadjusted Langevin algorithm and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics and establish guarantees on their (Rényi) DP. To this end, we develop a novel methodology based on Girsanov’s theorem combined with a perturbation trick to obtain bounds for an unbounded domain and in a non-convex setting. We establish: (i) uniform in $n$ privacy guarantees when the state of the chain after $n$ iterations is released, (ii) bounds on the privacy of the entire chain trajectory. These findings provide concrete guidelines for privacy-preserving MCMC.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Discrete Markov Probabilistic Models: An Improved Discrete Score-Based Framework with sharp convergence bounds under minimal assumptions

Le-Tuyet-Nhi Pham
Dario Shariatian
Antonio Ocello
Giovanni Conforti
Alain Durmus

This paper introduces the Discrete Markov Probabilistic Model (DMPM), a novel algorithm for discrete data generation. The algorithm operates in discrete space, where the noising process is a continuous-time Markov chain that can be sampled exactly via a Poissonian clock that flips labels uniformly at random. The time-reversal process, like the forward noise process, is a jump process, with its intensity governed by a discrete analogue of the classical score function. Crucially, this intensity is proven to be the conditional expectation of a function of the forward process, strengthening its theoretical alignment with score-based generative models while ensuring robustness and efficiency. We further establish convergence bounds for the algorithm under minimal assumptions and demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on low-dimensional Bernoulli-distributed datasets and high-dimensional binary MNIST data. The results highlight its strong performance in generating discrete structures. This work bridges theoretical foundations and practical applications, advancing the development of effective and theoretically grounded discrete generative modeling.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Exponential Convergence Guarantees for Iterative Markovian Fitting

Marta Gentiloni Silveri
Giovanni Conforti
Alain Durmus

The Schrödinger Bridge (SB) problem has become a fundamental tool in computational optimal transport and generative modeling. To address this problem, ideal methods such as Iterative Proportional Fitting and Iterative Markovian Fitting (IMF) have been proposed—alongside practical approximations like Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge and its Matching (DSBM) variant. While previous work have established asymptotic convergence guarantees for IMF, a quantitative, non-asymptotic understanding remains unknown. In this paper, we provide the first non-asymptotic exponential convergence guarantees for IMF under mild structural assumptions on the reference measure and marginal distributions, assuming a sufficiently large time horizon. Our results encompass two key regimes: one where the marginals are log-concave, and another where they are weakly log-concave. The analysis relies on new contraction results for the Markovian projection operator and paves the way to theoretical guarantees for DSBM.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Heavy-Tailed Diffusion with Denoising Levy Probabilistic Models

Dario Shariatian
Umut Simsekli
Alain Durmus

Investigating noise distributions beyond Gaussian in diffusion generative models remains an open challenge. The Gaussian case has been a large success experimentally and theoretically, admitting a unified stochastic differential equation (SDE) framework, encompassing score-based and denoising formulations. Recent studies have investigated the potential of \emph{heavy-tailed} noise distributions to mitigate mode collapse and effectively manage datasets exhibiting class imbalance, heavy tails, or prominent outliers. Very recently, Yoon et al.\ (NeurIPS 2023), presented the Levy-Ito model (LIM), directly extending the SDE-based framework to a class of heavy-tailed SDEs, where the injected noise followed an $\alpha$-stable distribution -- a rich class of heavy-tailed distributions. Despite its theoretical elegance and performance improvements, LIM relies on highly involved mathematical techniques, which may limit its accessibility and hinder its broader adoption and further development. In this study, we take a step back, and instead of starting from the SDE formulation, we extend the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) by directly replacing the Gaussian noise with $\alpha$-stable noise. By using only elementary proof techniques, we show that the proposed approach, \emph{denoising L\'{e}vy probabilistic model} (DLPM) algorithmically boils down to running vanilla DDPM with minor modifications, hence allowing the use of existing implementations with minimal changes. Remarkably, as opposed to the Gaussian case, DLPM and LIM yield different training algorithms and different backward processes, leading to distinct sampling algorithms. This fundamental difference translates favorably for the performance of DLPM in various aspects: our experiments show that DLPM achieves better coverage of the tails of the data distribution, better generation of unbalanced datasets, and improved computation times requiring significantly smaller number of backward steps.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learned Reference-based Diffusion Sampler for multi-modal distributions

Maxence Noble
Louis Grenioux
Marylou Gabrié
Alain Durmus

Over the past few years, several approaches utilizing score-based diffusion have been proposed to sample from probability distributions, that is without having access to exact samples and relying solely on evaluations of unnormalized densities. The resulting samplers approximate the time-reversal of a noising diffusion process, bridging the target distribution to an easy-to-sample base distribution. In practice, the performance of these methods heavily depends on key hyperparameters that require ground truth samples to be accurately tuned. Our work aims to highlight and address this fundamental issue, focusing in particular on multi-modal distributions, which pose significant challenges for existing sampling methods. Building on existing approaches, we introduce *Learned Reference-based Diffusion Sampler* (LRDS), a methodology specifically designed to leverage prior knowledge on the location of the target modes in order to bypass the obstacle of hyperparameter tuning. LRDS proceeds in two steps by (i) learning a *reference* diffusion model on samples located in high-density space regions and tailored for multimodality, and (ii) using this reference model to foster the training of a diffusion-based sampler. We experimentally demonstrate that LRDS best exploits prior knowledge on the target distribution compared to competing algorithms on a variety of challenging distributions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Non-Asymptotic Analysis Of Data Augmentation For Precision Matrix Estimation

Lucas Morisset
Adrien Hardy
Alain Durmus

This paper addresses the problem of inverse covariance (also known as precision matrix) estimation in high-dimensional settings. Specifically, we focus on two classes of estimators: linear shrinkage estimators with a target proportional to the identity matrix, and estimators derived from data augmentation (DA). Here, DA refers to the common practice of enriching a dataset with artificial samples—typically generated via a generative model or through random transformations of the original data—prior to model fitting. For both classes of estimators, we derive estimators and provide concentration bounds for their quadratic error. This allows for both method comparison and hyperparameter tuning, such as selecting the optimal proportion of artificial samples. On the technical side, our analysis relies on tools from random matrix theory. We introduce a novel deterministic equivalent for generalized resolvent matrices, accommodating dependent samples with specific structure. We support our theoretical results with numerical experiments.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Nonasymptotic Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent with the Richardson-Romberg Extrapolation

Marina Sheshukova
Denis Belomestny
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines
Alexey Naumov
Sergey Samsonov

We address the problem of solving strongly convex and smooth minimization problems using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with a constant step size. Previous works suggested to combine the Polyak-Ruppert averaging procedure with the Richardson-Romberg extrapolation to reduce the asymptotic bias of SGD at the expense of a mild increase of the variance. We significantly extend previous results by providing an expansion of the mean-squared error of the resulting estimator with respect to the number of iterations $n$. We show that the root mean-squared error can be decomposed into the sum of two terms: a leading one of order $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1/2})$ with explicit dependence on a minimax-optimal asymptotic covariance matrix, and a second-order term of order $\mathcal{O}(n^{-3/4})$, where the power $3/4$ is best known. We also extend this result to the higher-order moment bounds. Our analysis relies on the properties of the SGD iterates viewed as a time-homogeneous Markov chain. In particular, we establish that this chain is geometrically ergodic with respect to a suitably defined weighted Wasserstein semimetric.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Prediction-Aware Learning in Multi-Agent Systems

Aymeric Capitaine
Etienne Boursier
Eric Moulines
Michael I. Jordan
Alain Durmus

The framework of uncoupled online learning in multiplayer games has made significant progress in recent years. In particular, the development of time-varying games has considerably expanded its modeling capabilities. However, current regret bounds quickly become vacuous when the game undergoes significant variations over time, even when these variations are easy to predict. Intuitively, the ability of players to forecast future payoffs should lead to tighter guarantees, yet existing approaches fail to incorporate this aspect. This work aims to fill this gap by introducing a novel prediction-aware framework for time-varying games, where agents can forecast future payoffs and adapt their strategies accordingly. In this framework, payoffs depend on an underlying state of nature that agents predict in an online manner. To leverage these predictions, we propose the POMWU algorithm, a contextual extension of the optimistic Multiplicative Weight Update algorithm, for which we establish theoretical guarantees on social welfare and convergence to equilibrium. Our results demonstrate that, under bounded prediction errors, the proposed framework achieves performance comparable to the static setting. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of POMWU in a traffic routing experiment.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Scaffold with Stochastic Gradients: New Analysis with Linear Speed-Up

Paul Mangold
Alain Durmus
Aymeric Dieuleveut
Eric Moulines

This paper proposes a novel analysis for the Scaffold algorithm, a popular method for dealing with data heterogeneity in federated learning. While its convergence in deterministic settings—where local control variates mitigate client drift—is well established, the impact of stochastic gradient updates on its performance is less understood. To address this problem, we first show that its global parameters and control variates define a Markov chain that converges to a stationary distribution in the Wasserstein distance. Leveraging this result, we prove that Scaffold achieves linear speed-up in the number of clients up to higher-order terms in the step size. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals that Scaffold retains a higher-order bias, similar to FedAvg, that does not decrease as the number of clients increases. This highlights opportunities for developing improved stochastic federated learning algorithms.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Variational Diffusion Posterior Sampling with Midpoint Guidance

Badr Moufad
Yazid Janati
Lisa Bedin
Alain Durmus
Randal Douc
Eric Moulines
Jimmy Olsson

Diffusion models have recently shown considerable potential in solving Bayesian inverse problems when used as priors. However, sampling from the resulting denoising posterior distributions remains a challenge as it involves intractable terms. To tackle this issue, state-of-the-art approaches formulate the problem as that of sampling from a surrogate diffusion model targeting the posterior and decompose its scores into two terms: the prior score and an intractable guidance term. While the former is replaced by the pre-trained score of the considered diffusion model, the guidance term has to be estimated. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that utilises a decomposition of the transitions which, in contrast to previous methods, allows a trade-off between the complexity of the intractable guidance term and that of the prior transitions. We validate the proposed approach through extensive experiments on linear and nonlinear inverse problems, including challenging cases with latent diffusion models as priors, and demonstrate its effectiveness in reconstructing electrocardiogram (ECG) from partial measurements for accurate cardiac diagnosis.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Watermark Anything With Localized Messages

Tom Sander
Pierre Fernandez
Alain Durmus
Teddy Furon
Matthijs Douze

Image watermarking methods are not tailored to handle small watermarked areas. This restricts applications in real-world scenarios where parts of the image may come from different sources or have been edited. We introduce a deep-learning model for localized image watermarking, dubbed the Watermark Anything Model (WAM). The WAM embedder imperceptibly modifies the input image, while the extractor segments the received image into watermarked and non-watermarked areas and recovers one or several hidden messages from the areas found to be watermarked. The models are jointly trained at low resolution and without perceptual constraints, then post-trained for imperceptibility and multiple watermarks. Experiments show that WAM is competitive with state-of-the art methods in terms of imperceptibility and robustness, especially against inpainting and splicing, even on high-resolution images. Moreover, it offers new capabilities: WAM can locate watermarked areas in spliced images and extract distinct 32-bit messages with less than 1 bit error from multiple small regions -- no larger than 10\% of the image surface -- even for small $256\times 256$ images. Training and inference code and model weights are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/watermark-anything.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Differentially Private Representation Learning via Image Captioning

Tom Sander
Yaodong Yu
Maziar Sanjabi
Alain Durmus
Yi Ma 0001
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Chuan Guo 0001

Differentially private (DP) machine learning is considered the gold-standard solution for training a model from sensitive data while still preserving privacy. However, a major barrier to achieving this ideal is its sub-optimal privacy-accuracy trade-off, which is particularly visible in DP representation learning. Specifically, it has been shown that under modest privacy budgets, most models learn representations that are not significantly better than hand-crafted features. In this work, we show that effective DP representation learning can be done via image captioning and scaling up to internet-scale multimodal datasets. Through a series of engineering tricks, we successfully train a DP image captioner (DP-Cap) on a 233M subset of LAION-2B from scratch using a reasonable amount of computation, and obtaining unprecedented high-quality image features that can be used in a variety of downstream vision and vision-language tasks. For example, under a privacy budget of $\varepsilon=8$ for the LAION dataset, a linear classifier trained on top of learned DP-Cap features attains $65. 8%$ accuracy on ImageNet-1K, considerably improving the previous SOTA of $56. 5%$. Our work challenges the prevailing sentiment that high-utility DP representation learning cannot be achieved by training from scratch.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Divide-and-Conquer Posterior Sampling for Denoising Diffusion priors

Yazid Janati
Badr Moufad
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines
Jimmy Olsson

Recent advancements in solving Bayesian inverse problems have spotlighted denoising diffusion models (DDMs) as effective priors. Although these have great potential, DDM priors yield complex posterior distributions that are challenging to sample from. Existing approaches to posterior sampling in this context address this problem either by retraining model-specific components, leading to stiff and cumbersome methods, or by introducing approximations with uncontrolled errors that affect the accuracy of the produced samples. We present an innovative framework, divide-and-conquer posterior sampling, which leverages the inherent structure of DDMs to construct a sequence of intermediate posteriors that guide the produced samples to the target posterior. Our method significantly reduces the approximation error associated with current techniques without the need for retraining. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our approach for a wide range of Bayesian inverse problems. The code is available at \url{https: //github. com/Badr-MOUFAD/dcps}

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Incentivized Learning in Principal-Agent Bandit Games

Antoine Scheid
Daniil Tiapkin
Etienne Boursier
Aymeric Capitaine
Eric Moulines
Michael I. Jordan
El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi
Alain Durmus

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the agent. However, the principal can influence the agent’s decisions by offering incentives which add up to his rewards. The principal aims to iteratively learn an incentive policy to maximize her own total utility. This framework extends usual bandit problems and is motivated by several practical applications, such as healthcare or ecological taxation, where traditionally used mechanism design theories often overlook the learning aspect of the problem. We present nearly optimal (with respect to a horizon $T$) learning algorithms for the principal’s regret in both multi-armed and linear contextual settings. Finally, we support our theoretical guarantees through numerical experiments.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Learning to Mitigate Externalities: the Coase Theorem with Hindsight Rationality

Antoine Scheid
Aymeric Capitaine
Etienne Boursier
Eric Moulines
Michael Jordan
Alain Durmus

In Economics, the concept of externality refers to any indirect effect resulting from an interaction between players and affecting a third party without compensation. Most of the models within which externality has been studied assume that agents have perfect knowledge of their environment and preferences. This is a major hindrance to the practical implementation of many proposed solutions. To adress this issue, we consider a two-players bandit game setting where the actions of one of the player affect the other one. Building upon this setup, we extend the Coase theorem [Coase, 2013], which suggests that the optimal approach for maximizing the social welfare in the presence of externality is to establish property rights, i. e. , enabling transfers and bargaining between the players. Nonetheless, this fundamental result relies on the assumption that bargainers possess perfect knowledge of the underlying game. We first demonstrate that in the absence of property rights in the considered online scenario, the social welfare breaks down. We then provide a policy for the players, which allows them to learn a bargaining strategy which maximizes the total welfare, recovering the Coase theorem under uncertainty.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Piecewise deterministic generative models

Andrea Bertazzi
Dario Shariatian
Umut Simsekli
Eric Moulines
Alain Durmus

We introduce a novel class of generative models based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs), a family of non-diffusive stochastic processes consisting of deterministic motion and random jumps at random times. Similarly to diffusions, such Markov processes admit time reversals that turn out to be PDMPs as well. We apply this observation to three PDMPs considered in the literature: the Zig-Zag process, Bouncy Particle Sampler, and Randomised Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. For these three particular instances, we show that the jump rates and kernels of the corresponding time reversals admit explicit expressions depending on some conditional densities of the PDMP under consideration before and after a jump. Based on these results, we propose efficient training procedures to learn these characteristics and consider methods to approximately simulate the reverse process. Finally, we provide bounds in the total variation distance between the data distribution and the resulting distribution of our model in the case where the base distribution is the standard $d$-dimensional Gaussian distribution. Promising numerical simulations support further investigations into this class of models.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Shape analysis for time series

Thibaut Germain
Samuel Gruffaz
Charles Truong
Laurent Oudre
Alain Durmus

Analyzing inter-individual variability of physiological functions is particularly appealing in medical and biological contexts to describe or quantify health conditions. Such analysis can be done by comparing individuals to a reference one with time series as biomedical data. This paper introduces an unsupervised representation learning (URL) algorithm for time series tailored to inter-individual studies. The idea is to represent time series as deformations of a reference time series. The deformations are diffeomorphisms parameterized and learned by our method called TS-LDDMM. Once the deformations and the reference time series are learned, the vector representations of individual time series are given by the parametrization of their corresponding deformation. At the crossroads between URL for time series and shape analysis, the proposed algorithm handles irregularly sampled multivariate time series of variable lengths and provides shape-based representations of temporal data. In this work, we establish a representation theorem for the graph of a time series and derive its consequences on the LDDMM framework. We showcase the advantages of our representation compared to existing methods using synthetic data and real-world examples motivated by biomedical applications.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Stochastic Localization via Iterative Posterior Sampling

Louis Grenioux
Maxence Noble
Marylou Gabrié
Alain Durmus

Building upon score-based learning, new interest in stochastic localization techniques has recently emerged. In these models, one seeks to noise a sample from the data distribution through a stochastic process, called observation process, and progressively learns a denoiser associated to this dynamics. Apart from specific applications, the use of stochastic localization for the problem of sampling from an unnormalized target density has not been explored extensively. This work contributes to fill this gap. We consider a general stochastic localization framework and introduce an explicit class of observation processes, associated with flexible denoising schedules. We provide a complete methodology, Stochastic Localization via Iterative Posterior Sampling ( SLIPS ), to obtain approximate samples of these dynamics, and as a by-product, samples from the target distribution. Our scheme is based on a Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation of the denoiser and comes with detailed practical guidelines. We illustrate the benefits and applicability of SLIPS on several benchmarks of multi-modal distributions, including Gaussian mixtures in increasing dimensions, Bayesian logistic regression and a high-dimensional field system from statistical-mechanics.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Theoretical Guarantees for Variational Inference with Fixed-Variance Mixture of Gaussians

Tom Huix
Anna Korba
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is (typically) the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical properties of VI have only recently received attention, and is restricted to the Gaussian case. This research paper aims to contribute to the theoretical study of VI in the non-Gaussian case by investigating the setting of Mixture of Gaussians with fixed covariance. In this view, VI over this specific family can be casted as the minimization of a Mollified relative entropy, i. e. the KL between the convolution (with respect to a Gaussian kernel) of an atomic measure supported on Diracs, where the support of the atomic measure correspond to the localization of the Gaussian components, and the target distribution. Hence, solving variational inference is equivalent to optimizing the positions of the Diracs (the particles), which can be done through gradient descent and takes the form of an interacting particle system. We study two sources of error in variational inference in this context. The first is an optimization result that is a descent lemma establishing that the algorithm decreases the objective at each iteration. The second is an approximation error that upper bounds the mollified relative entropy between an optimal finite mixture and the target distribution.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Theoretical guarantees in KL for Diffusion Flow Matching

Marta G. Silveri
Giovanni Conforti
Alain Durmus

Flow Matching (FM) (also referred to as stochastic interpolants or rectified flows) stands out as a class of generative models that aims to bridge in finite time the target distribution $\nu^\star$ with an auxiliary distribution $\mu$ leveraging a fixed coupling $\pi$ and a bridge which can either be deterministic or stochastic. These two ingredients define a path measure which can then be approximated by learning the drift of its Markovian projection. The main contribution of this paper is to provide relatively mild assumption on $\nu^\star$, $\mu$ and $\pi$ to obtain non-asymptotics guarantees for Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) models using as bridge the conditional distribution associated with the Brownian motion. More precisely, it establishes bounds on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and the one generated by such DFM models under moment conditions on the score of $\nu^\star$, $\mu$ and $\pi$, and a standard $\mathrm{L}^2$-drift-approximation error assumption.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Unravelling in Collaborative Learning

Aymeric Capitaine
Etienne Boursier
Antoine Scheid
Eric Moulines
Michael Jordan
El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi
Alain Durmus

Collaborative learning offers a promising avenue for leveraging decentralized data. However, collaboration in groups of strategic learners is not a given. In this work, we consider strategic agents who wish to train a model together but have sampling distributions of different quality. The collaboration is organized by a benevolent aggregator who gathers samples so as to maximize total welfare, but is unaware of data quality. This setting allows us to shed light on the deleterious effect of adverse selection in collaborative learning. More precisely, we demonstrate that when data quality indices are private, the coalition may undergo a phenomenon known as unravelling, wherein it shrinks up to the point that it becomes empty or solely comprised of the worst agent. We show how this issue can be addressed without making use of external transfers, by proposing a novel method inspired by probabilistic verification. This approach makes the grand coalition a Nash equilibrium with high probability despite information asymmetry, thereby breaking unravelling.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

VITS: Variational Inference Thompson Sampling for contextual bandits

Pierre Clavier
Tom Huix
Alain Durmus

In this paper, we introduce and analyze a variant of the Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm for contextual bandits. At each round, traditional TS requires samples from the current posterior distribution, which is usually intractable. To circumvent this issue, approximate inference techniques can be used and provide samples with distribution close to the posteriors. However, current approximate techniques yield to either poor estimation (Laplace approximation) or can be computationally expensive (MCMC methods, Ensemble sampling. ..). In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, Varational Inference TS $\mathtt{VITS}$, based on Gaussian Variational Inference. This scheme provides powerful posterior approximations which are easy to sample from, and is computationally efficient, making it an ideal choice for TS. In addition, we show that $\mathtt{VITS}$ achieves a sub-linear regret bound of the same order in the dimension and number of round as traditional TS for linear contextual bandit. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally the effectiveness of $\mathtt{VITS}$ on both synthetic and real world datasets

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Watermarking Makes Language Models Radioactive

Tom Sander
Pierre Fernandez
Alain Durmus
Matthijs Douze
Teddy Furon

We investigate the radioactivity of text generated by large language models (LLM), \ie whether it is possible to detect that such synthetic input was used to train a subsequent LLM. Current methods like membership inference or active IP protection either work only in settings where the suspected text is known or do not provide reliable statistical guarantees. We discover that, on the contrary, it is possible to reliably determine if a language model was trained on synthetic data if that data is output by a watermarked LLM. Our new methods, specialized for radioactivity, detects with a provable confidence weak residuals of the watermark signal in the fine-tuned LLM. We link the radioactivity contamination level to the following properties: the watermark robustness, its proportion in the training set, and the fine-tuning process. For instance, if the suspect model is open-weight, we demonstrate that training on watermarked instructions can be detected with high confidence ($p$-value $< 10^{-5}$) even when as little as $5\%$ of training text is watermarked.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Approximate Heavy Tails in Offline (Multi-Pass) Stochastic Gradient Descent

Kruno Lehman
Alain Durmus
Umut Simsekli

A recent line of empirical studies has demonstrated that SGD might exhibit a heavy-tailed behavior in practical settings, and the heaviness of the tails might correlate with the overall performance. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such heavy tails. Previous works on this problem only considered, up to our knowledge, online (also called single-pass) SGD, in which the emergence of heavy tails in theoretical findings is contingent upon access to an infinite amount of data. Hence, the underlying mechanism generating the reported heavy-tailed behavior in practical settings, where the amount of training data is finite, is still not well-understood. Our contribution aims to fill this gap. In particular, we show that the stationary distribution of offline (also called multi-pass) SGD exhibits ‘approximate’ power-law tails and the approximation error is controlled by how fast the empirical distribution of the training data converges to the true underlying data distribution in the Wasserstein metric. Our main takeaway is that, as the number of data points increases, offline SGD will behave increasingly ‘power-law-like’. To achieve this result, we first prove nonasymptotic Wasserstein convergence bounds for offline SGD to online SGD as the number of data points increases, which can be interesting on their own. Finally, we illustrate our theory on various experiments conducted on synthetic data and neural networks.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

On Sampling with Approximate Transport Maps

Louis Grenioux
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines
Marylou Gabrié

Transport maps can ease the sampling of distributions with non-trivial geometries by transforming them into distributions that are easier to handle. The potential of this approach has risen with the development of Normalizing Flows (NF) which are maps parameterized with deep neural networks trained to push a reference distribution towards a target. NF-enhanced samplers recently proposed blend (Markov chain) Monte Carlo methods with either (i) proposal draws from the flow or (ii) a flow-based reparametrization. In both cases, the quality of the learned transport conditions performance. The present work clarifies for the first time the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches. Our study concludes that multimodal targets can be reliably handled with flow-based proposals up to moderately high dimensions. In contrast, methods relying on reparametrization struggle with multimodality but are more robust otherwise in high-dimensional settings and under poor training. To further illustrate the influence of target-proposal adequacy, we also derive a new quantitative bound for the mixing time of the Independent Metropolis-Hastings sampler.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Tree-Based Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge with Applications to Wasserstein Barycenters

Maxence Noble
Valentin De Bortoli
Arnaud Doucet
Alain Durmus

Multi-marginal Optimal Transport (mOT), a generalization of OT, aims at minimizing the integral of a cost function with respect to a distribution with some prescribed marginals. In this paper, we consider an entropic version of mOT with a tree-structured quadratic cost, i. e. , a function that can be written as a sum of pairwise cost functions between the nodes of a tree. To address this problem, we develop Tree-based Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge (TreeDSB), an extension of the Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge (DSB) algorithm. TreeDSB corresponds to a dynamic and continuous state-space counterpart of the multimarginal Sinkhorn algorithm. A notable use case of our methodology is to compute Wasserstein barycenters which can be recast as the solution of a mOT problem on a star-shaped tree. We demonstrate that our methodology can be applied in high-dimensional settings such as image interpolation and Bayesian fusion.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Unbiased constrained sampling with Self-Concordant Barrier Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Maxence Noble
Valentin De Bortoli
Alain Durmus

In this paper, we propose Barrier Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (BHMC), a version of the HMC algorithm which aims at sampling from a Gibbs distribution $\pi$ on a manifold $\mathsf{M}$, endowed with a Hessian metric $\mathfrak{g}$ derived from a self-concordant barrier. Our method relies on Hamiltonian dynamics which comprises $\mathfrak{g}$. Therefore, it incorporates the constraints defining $\mathsf{M}$ and is able to exploit its underlying geometry. However, the corresponding Hamiltonian dynamics is defined via non separable Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) in contrast to the Euclidean case. It implies unavoidable bias in existing generalization of HMC to Riemannian manifolds. In this paper, we propose a new filter step, called ``involution checking step'', to address this problem. This step is implemented in two versions of BHMC, coined continuous BHMC (c-bHMC) and numerical BHMC (n-BHMC) respectively. Our main results establish that these two new algorithms generate reversible Markov chains with respect to $\pi$ and do not suffer from any bias in comparison to previous implementations. Our conclusions are supported by numerical experiments where we consider target distributions defined on polytopes.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

FedPop: A Bayesian Approach for Personalised Federated Learning

Nikita Kotelevskii
Maxime Vono
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines

Personalised federated learning (FL) aims at collaboratively learning a machine learning model tailored for each client. Albeit promising advances have been made in this direction, most of the existing approaches do not allow for uncertainty quantification which is crucial in many applications. In addition, personalisation in the cross-silo and cross-device setting still involves important issues, especially for new clients or those having a small number of observations. This paper aims at filling these gaps. To this end, we propose a novel methodology coined FedPop by recasting personalised FL into the population modeling paradigm where clients’ models involve fixed common population parameters and random effects, aiming at explaining data heterogeneity. To derive convergence guarantees for our scheme, we introduce a new class of federated stochastic optimisation algorithms that relies on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Compared to existing personalised FL methods, the proposed methodology has important benefits: it is robust to client drift, practical for inference on new clients, and above all, enables uncertainty quantification under mild computational and memory overheads. We provide nonasymptotic convergence guarantees for the proposed algorithms and illustrate their performances on various personalised federated learning tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Local-Global MCMC kernels: the best of both worlds

Sergey Samsonov
Evgeny Lagutin
Marylou Gabrié
Alain Durmus
Alexey Naumov
Eric Moulines

Recent works leveraging learning to enhance sampling have shown promising results, in particular by designing effective non-local moves and global proposals. However, learning accuracy is inevitably limited in regions where little data is available such as in the tails of distributions as well as in high-dimensional problems. In the present paper we study an Explore-Exploit Markov chain Monte Carlo strategy ($\operatorname{Ex^2MCMC}$) that combines local and global samplers showing that it enjoys the advantages of both approaches. We prove $V$-uniform geometric ergodicity of $\operatorname{Ex^2MCMC}$ without requiring a uniform adaptation of the global sampler to the target distribution. We also compute explicit bounds on the mixing rate of the Explore-Exploit strategy under realistic conditions. Moreover, we propose an adaptive version of the strategy ($\operatorname{FlEx^2MCMC}$) where a normalizing flow is trained while sampling to serve as a proposal for global moves. We illustrate the efficiency of $\operatorname{Ex^2MCMC}$ and its adaptive version on classical sampling benchmarks as well as in sampling high-dimensional distributions defined by Generative Adversarial Networks seen as Energy Based Models.

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ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

DG-LMC: A Turn-key and Scalable Synchronous Distributed MCMC Algorithm via Langevin Monte Carlo within Gibbs

Vincent Plassier
Maxime Vono
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines

Performing reliable Bayesian inference on a big data scale is becoming a keystone in the modern era of machine learning. A workhorse class of methods to achieve this task are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms and their design to handle distributed datasets has been the subject of many works. However, existing methods are not completely either reliable or computationally efficient. In this paper, we propose to fill this gap in the case where the dataset is partitioned and stored on computing nodes within a cluster under a master/slaves architecture. We derive a user-friendly centralised distributed MCMC algorithm with provable scaling in high-dimensional settings. We illustrate the relevance of the proposed methodology on both synthetic and real data experiments.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Fast Approximation of the Sliced-Wasserstein Distance Using Concentration of Random Projections

Kimia Nadjahi
Alain Durmus
Pierre E Jacob
Roland Badeau
Umut Simsekli

The Sliced-Wasserstein distance (SW) is being increasingly used in machine learning applications as an alternative to the Wasserstein distance and offers significant computational and statistical benefits. Since it is defined as an expectation over random projections, SW is commonly approximated by Monte Carlo. We adopt a new perspective to approximate SW by making use of the concentration of measure phenomenon: under mild assumptions, one-dimensional projections of a high-dimensional random vector are approximately Gaussian. Based on this observation, we develop a simple deterministic approximation for SW. Our method does not require sampling a number of random projections, and is therefore both accurate and easy to use compared to the usual Monte Carlo approximation. We derive nonasymptotical guarantees for our approach, and show that the approximation error goes to zero as the dimension increases, under a weak dependence condition on the data distribution. We validate our theoretical findings on synthetic datasets, and illustrate the proposed approximation on a generative modeling problem.

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ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Monte Carlo Variational Auto-Encoders

Achille Thin
Nikita Kotelevskii
Arnaud Doucet
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines
Maxim Panov

Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are popular deep latent variable models which are trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). To obtain tighter ELBO and hence better variational approximations, it has been proposed to use importance sampling to get a lower variance estimate of the evidence. However, importance sampling is known to perform poorly in high dimensions. While it has been suggested many times in the literature to use more sophisticated algorithms such as Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) and its Sequential Importance Sampling (SIS) extensions, the potential benefits brought by these advanced techniques have never been realized for VAE: the AIS estimate cannot be easily differentiated, while SIS requires the specification of carefully chosen backward Markov kernels. In this paper, we address both issues and demonstrate the performance of the resulting Monte Carlo VAEs on a variety of applications.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

NEO: Non Equilibrium Sampling on the Orbits of a Deterministic Transform

Achille Thin
Yazid Janati El Idrissi
Sylvain Le Corff
Charles Ollion
Eric Moulines
Arnaud Doucet
Alain Durmus
Christian X Robert

Sampling from a complex distribution $\pi$ and approximating its intractable normalizing constant $\mathrm{Z}$ are challenging problems. In this paper, a novel family of importance samplers (IS) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers is derived. Given an invertible map $\mathrm{T}$, these schemes combine (with weights) elements from the forward and backward Orbits through points sampled from a proposal distribution $\rho$. The map $\mathrm{T}$ does not leave the target $\pi$ invariant, hence the name NEO, standing for Non-Equilibrium Orbits. NEO-IS provides unbiased estimators of the normalizing constant and self-normalized IS estimators of expectations under $\pi$ while NEO-MCMC combines multiple NEO-IS estimates of the normalizing constant and an iterated sampling-importance resampling mechanism to sample from $\pi$. For $\mathrm{T}$ chosen as a discrete-time integrator of a conformal Hamiltonian system, NEO-IS achieves state-of-the art performance on difficult benchmarks and NEO-MCMC is able to explore highly multimodal targets. Additionally, we provide detailed theoretical results for both methods. In particular, we show that NEO-MCMC is uniformly geometrically ergodic and establish explicit mixing time estimates under mild conditions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Tight High Probability Bounds for Linear Stochastic Approximation with Fixed Stepsize

Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines
Alexey Naumov
Sergey Samsonov
Kevin Scaman
Hoi-To Wai

This paper provides a non-asymptotic analysis of linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with fixed stepsize. This family of methods arises in many machine learning tasks and is used to obtain approximate solutions of a linear system $\bar{A}\theta = \bar{b}$ for which $\bar{A}$ and $\bar{b}$ can only be accessed through random estimates $\{({\bf A}_n, {\bf b}_n): n \in \mathbb{N}^*\}$. Our analysis is based on new results regarding moments and high probability bounds for products of matrices which are shown to be tight. We derive high probability bounds on the performance of LSA under weaker conditions on the sequence $\{({\bf A}_n, {\bf b}_n): n \in \mathbb{N}^*\}$ than previous works. However, in contrast, we establish polynomial concentration bounds with order depending on the stepsize. We show that our conclusions cannot be improved without additional assumptions on the sequence of random matrices $\{{\bf A}_n: n \in \mathbb{N}^*\}$, and in particular that no Gaussian or exponential high probability bounds can hold. Finally, we pay a particular attention to establishing bounds with sharp order with respect to the number of iterations and the stepsize and whose leading terms contain the covariance matrices appearing in the central limit theorems.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Quantitative Propagation of Chaos for SGD in Wide Neural Networks

Valentin De Bortoli
Alain Durmus
Xavier Fontaine
Umut Simsekli

In this paper, we investigate the limiting behavior of a continuous-time counterpart of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm applied to two-layer overparameterized neural networks, as the number or neurons (i. e. , the size of the hidden layer) $N \to \plusinfty$. Following a probabilistic approach, we show `propagation of chaos' for the particle system defined by this continuous-time dynamics under different scenarios, indicating that the statistical interaction between the particles asymptotically vanishes. In particular, we establish quantitative convergence with respect to $N$ of any particle to a solution of a mean-field McKean-Vlasov equation in the metric space endowed with the Wasserstein distance. In comparison to previous works on the subject, we consider settings in which the sequence of stepsizes in SGD can potentially depend on the number of neurons and the iterations. We then identify two regimes under which different mean-field limits are obtained, one of them corresponding to an implicitly regularized version of the minimization problem at hand. We perform various experiments on real datasets to validate our theoretical results, assessing the existence of these two regimes on classification problems and illustrating our convergence results.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Statistical and Topological Properties of Sliced Probability Divergences

Kimia Nadjahi
Alain Durmus
Lénaïc Chizat
Soheil Kolouri
Shahin Shahrampour
Umut Simsekli

The idea of slicing divergences has been proven to be successful when comparing two probability measures in various machine learning applications including generative modeling, and consists in computing the expected value of a `base divergence' between \emph{one-dimensional random projections} of the two measures. However, the topological, statistical, and computational consequences of this technique have not yet been well-established. In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap and derive various theoretical properties of sliced probability divergences. First, we show that slicing preserves the metric axioms and the weak continuity of the divergence, implying that the sliced divergence will share similar topological properties. We then precise the results in the case where the base divergence belongs to the class of integral probability metrics. On the other hand, we establish that, under mild conditions, the sample complexity of a sliced divergence does not depend on the problem dimension. We finally apply our general results to several base divergences, and illustrate our theory on both synthetic and real data experiments.

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JMLR Journal 2019 Journal Article

Analysis of Langevin Monte Carlo via Convex Optimization

Alain Durmus
Szymon Majewski
Błażej Miasojedow

In this paper, we provide new insights on the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm. We show that this method can be formulated as the first order optimization algorithm for an objective functional defined on the Wasserstein space of order $2$. Using this interpretation and techniques borrowed from convex optimization, we give a non-asymptotic analysis of this method to sample from log-concave smooth target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$. Based on this interpretation, we propose two new methods for sampling from a non-smooth target distribution. These new algorithms are natural extensions of the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm, which is a popular extension of the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm for largescale Bayesian inference. Using the optimization perspective, we provide non-asymptotic convergence analysis for the newly proposed methods. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2019. ( edit, beta )

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Asymptotic Guarantees for Learning Generative Models with the Sliced-Wasserstein Distance

Kimia Nadjahi
Alain Durmus
Umut Simsekli
Roland Badeau

Minimum expected distance estimation (MEDE) algorithms have been widely used for probabilistic models with intractable likelihood functions and they have become increasingly popular due to their use in implicit generative modeling (e. g. \ Wasserstein generative adversarial networks, Wasserstein autoencoders). Emerging from computational optimal transport, the Sliced-Wasserstein (SW) distance has become a popular choice in MEDE thanks to its simplicity and computational benefits. While several studies have reported empirical success on generative modeling with SW, the theoretical properties of such estimators have not yet been established. In this study, we investigate the asymptotic properties of estimators that are obtained by minimizing SW. We first show that convergence in SW implies weak convergence of probability measures in general Wasserstein spaces. Then we show that estimators obtained by minimizing SW (and also an approximate version of SW) are asymptotically consistent. We finally prove a central limit theorem, which characterizes the asymptotic distribution of the estimators and establish a convergence rate of $\sqrt{n}$, where $n$ denotes the number of observed data points. We illustrate the validity of our theory on both synthetic data and neural networks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Copula-like Variational Inference

Marcel Hirt
Petros Dellaportas
Alain Durmus

This paper considers a new family of variational distributions motivated by Sklar's theorem. This family is based on new copula-like densities on the hypercube with non-uniform marginals which can be sampled efficiently, i. e. with a complexity linear in the dimension d of the state space. Then, the proposed variational densities that we suggest can be seen as arising from these copula-like densities used as base distributions on the hypercube with Gaussian quantile functions and sparse rotation matrices as normalizing flows. The latter correspond to a rotation of the marginals with complexity O(d log d). We provide some empirical evidence that such a variational family can also approximate non-Gaussian posteriors and can be beneficial compared to Gaussian approximations. Our method performs largely comparably to state-of-the-art variational approximations on standard regression and classification benchmarks for Bayesian Neural Networks.

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ICML Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Sliced-Wasserstein Flows: Nonparametric Generative Modeling via Optimal Transport and Diffusions

Antoine Liutkus
Umut Simsekli
Szymon Majewski
Alain Durmus
Fabian-Robert Stöter

By building upon the recent theory that established the connection between implicit generative modeling (IGM) and optimal transport, in this study, we propose a novel parameter-free algorithm for learning the underlying distributions of complicated datasets and sampling from them. The proposed algorithm is based on a functional optimization problem, which aims at finding a measure that is close to the data distribution as much as possible and also expressive enough for generative modeling purposes. We formulate the problem as a gradient flow in the space of probability measures. The connections between gradient flows and stochastic differential equations let us develop a computationally efficient algorithm for solving the optimization problem. We provide formal theoretical analysis where we prove finite-time error guarantees for the proposed algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed algorithm is the first nonparametric IGM algorithm with explicit theoretical guarantees. Our experimental results support our theory and show that our algorithm is able to successfully capture the structure of different types of data distributions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

The promises and pitfalls of Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics

Nicolas Brosse
Alain Durmus
Eric Moulines

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) has emerged as a key MCMC algorithm for Bayesian learning from large scale datasets. While SGLD with decreasing step sizes converges weakly to the posterior distribution, the algorithm is often used with a constant step size in practice and has demonstrated spectacular successes in machine learning tasks. The current practice is to set the step size inversely proportional to N where N is the number of training samples. As N becomes large, we show that the SGLD algorithm has an invariant probability measure which significantly departs from the target posterior and behaves like as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). This difference is inherently due to the high variance of the stochastic gradients. Several strategies have been suggested to reduce this effect; among them, SGLD Fixed Point (SGLDFP) uses carefully designed control variates to reduce the variance of the stochastic gradients. We show that SGLDFP gives approximate samples from the posterior distribution, with an accuracy comparable to the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm for a computational cost sublinear in the number of data points. We provide a detailed analysis of the Wasserstein distances between LMC, SGLD, SGLDFP and SGD and explicit expressions of the means and covariance matrices of their invariant distributions. Our findings are supported by limited numerical experiments.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Stochastic Gradient Richardson-Romberg Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Alain Durmus
Umut Simsekli
Eric Moulines
Roland Badeau
Gaël Richard

Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) algorithms have become increasingly popular for Bayesian inference in large-scale applications. Even though these methods have proved useful in several scenarios, their performance is often limited by their bias. In this study, we propose a novel sampling algorithm that aims to reduce the bias of SG-MCMC while keeping the variance at a reasonable level. Our approach is based on a numerical sequence acceleration method, namely the Richardson-Romberg extrapolation, which simply boils down to running almost the same SG-MCMC algorithm twice in parallel with different step sizes. We illustrate our framework on the popular Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm and propose a novel SG-MCMC algorithm referred to as Stochastic Gradient Richardson-Romberg Langevin Dynamics (SGRRLD). We provide formal theoretical analysis and show that SGRRLD is asymptotically consistent, satisfies a central limit theorem, and its non-asymptotic bias and the mean squared-error can be bounded. Our results show that SGRRLD attains higher rates of convergence than SGLD in both finite-time and asymptotically, and it achieves the theoretical accuracy of the methods that are based on higher-order integrators. We support our findings using both synthetic and real data experiments.

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