Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of kernels is often non-trivial and can be restrictive for the flexibility of the method. Recent works show that functional gradient flow approximations with quadratic form regularization terms can improve performance. In this paper, we propose a ParVI framework, called generalized Wasserstein gradient descent (GWG), based on a generalized Wasserstein gradient flow of the KL divergence, which can be viewed as a functional gradient method with a broader class of regularizers induced by convex functions. We show that GWG exhibits strong convergence guarantees. We also provide an adaptive version that automatically chooses Wasserstein metric to accelerate convergence. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework on both simulated and real data problems.

该论文介绍了一种称为广义Wasserstein梯度下降（GWG）的粒子变分推断方法框架，基于KL散度的广义Wasserstein梯度流，可视为具有更广泛正则化器类的函数梯度方法，展示了GWG具有强大的收敛性保证，通过实验证明了该框架在模拟和真实数据问题上的有效性和高效性。

基于粒子的广义Wasserstein梯度流的变分推理