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SFESS: score function estimators for k-subset sampling
KTH, Centres, SeRC - Swedish e-Science Research Centre. KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Robotics, Perception and Learning, RPL.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, Centres, SeRC - Swedish e-Science Research Centre. KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Robotics, Perception and Learning, RPL.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5211-6388
2025 (English)In: 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR , 2025, p. 70583-70597Conference paper, Published paper (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
International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR , 2025. p. 70583-70597
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-385676Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105010284468OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-385676DiVA, id: diva2:2087563
Conference
13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, Singapore, Singapore, Apr 24 2025 - Apr 28 2025
Note

Part of ISBN 9798331320850

QC 20260721

Available from: 2026-07-21 Created: 2026-07-21 Last updated: 2026-07-21Bibliographically approved

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Wijk, KlasVinuesa, RicardoAzizpour, Hossein

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Wijk, KlasVinuesa, RicardoAzizpour, Hossein
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SeRC - Swedish e-Science Research CentreRobotics, Perception and Learning, RPLFluid MechanicsScience for Life Laboratory, SciLifeLab
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