{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/particle-based-energetic-variational","title":"Particle-based Energetic Variational Inference","arxiv_id":"2004.06443","date":"2020-04-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yiwei Wang","Jiuhai Chen","Chun Liu","Lulu Kang"],"abstract":"We introduce a new variational inference (VI) framework, called energetic variational inference (EVI). It minimizes the VI objective function based on a prescribed energy-dissipation law. Using the EVI framework, we can derive many existing Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods, including the popular Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) approach. More importantly, many new ParVI schemes can be created under this framework. For illustration, we propose a new particle-based EVI scheme, which performs the particle-based approximation of the density first and then uses the approximated density in the variational procedure, or \"Approximation-then-Variation\" for short. Thanks to this order of approximation and variation, the new scheme can maintain the variational structure at the particle level, and can significantly decrease the KL-divergence in each iteration. Numerical experiments show the proposed method outperforms some existing ParVI methods in terms of fidelity to the target distribution.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.06443v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.06443v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"particle-based-energetic-variational","repo_url":"https://github.com/SimonKafka/EVI","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"variational-inference","task_name":"Variational Inference"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2004.06443","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}