With friends at the University of Warwick (in particular, Rocco Caprio and @adriencorenflos.bsky.social), we've recently arXived some work (arxiv.org/abs/2605.30253) on a method for approximate inference known as "Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference", or "CAVI" for short. …
Who's Who of AI
Sam Power
Lecturer in Maths & Stats at Bristol. Interested in probabilistic + numerical computation, statistical modelling + inference. (he / him).
Homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/sp-monte-carlo
Seminar: https://sites.google.com/view/monte-carlo-semina
What they're sharing
Wasserstein Contraction of Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Articles & links
You might enjoy arxiv.org/abs/1412.4430. It has a nice duality-based derivation of the dynamic approach to optimal transport (together with some sweet reasoning for why the drift is of gradient type) which can potentially be translated into your discrete-time setting to match …
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In Sam Power's orbit
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