Abstract: Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic, interacting particle-based algorithm for nonparametric variational inference, yet its theoretical properties remain challenging to fully understand. This talk presents two complementary perspectives on SVGD. First, we introduce Gaussian-SVGD, a framework that projects SVGD onto the family of Gaussian distributions using a bilinear kernel. We establish rigorous convergence results for both mean-field dynamics and finite-particle systems, proving linear convergence to equilibrium in strongly log-concave settings. This framework also unifies recent algorithms for…

Abstract: This talk will address to recent projects I am excited about. The first describes efficient methodologies for hyper-parameter estimation in optimization algorithms. I will describe two approaches for how to adaptively estimate these parameters that often lead to significant improvement in convergence. The second describes a new method, called Metropolis-Adjusted Preconditioned Langevin Algorithm for sampling from a convex body. Taking an optimization perspective, I focus on the mixing time guarantees of these algorithms — an essential theoretical property for…