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SFESS: Score Function Estimators for k-Subset Sampling
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Robotics, Perception and Learning, RPL. KTH, Centres, SeRC - Swedish e-Science Research Centre.ORCID iD: 0009-0006-5400-8704
KTH, Centres, SeRC - Swedish e-Science Research Centre. KTH, School of Engineering Sciences (SCI), Engineering Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6570-5499
KTH, Centres, Science for Life Laboratory, SciLifeLab. KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Robotics, Perception and Learning, RPL. KTH, Centres, SeRC - Swedish e-Science Research Centre.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5211-6388
2025 (English)Conference paper, Poster (with or without abstract) (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Are score function estimators a viable approach to learning with k-subset sampling? Sampling k-subsets is a fundamental operation that is not amenable to differentiable parametrization, impeding gradient-based optimization. Previous work has favored approximate pathwise gradients or relaxed sampling, dismissing score function estimators because of their high variance. Inspired by the success of score function estimators in variational inference and reinforcement learning, we revisit them for k-subset sampling. We demonstrate how to efficiently compute the distribution's score function using a discrete Fourier transform and reduce the estimator's variance with control variates. The resulting estimator provides both k-hot samples and unbiased gradient estimates while being applicable to non-differentiable downstream models, unlike existing methods. We validate our approach experimentally and find that it produces results comparable to those of recent state-of-the-art pathwise gradient estimators across a range of tasks.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025.
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-375334OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-375334DiVA, id: diva2:2027259
Conference
The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, Singapore, Apr 24-28, 2025
Note

QC 20260112

Available from: 2026-01-12 Created: 2026-01-12 Last updated: 2026-01-12Bibliographically approved

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Wijk, KlasVinuesa, RicardoAzizpour, Hossein

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Robotics, Perception and Learning, RPLSeRC - Swedish e-Science Research CentreFluid MechanicsScience for Life Laboratory, SciLifeLab
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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
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  • ieee
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