May 18 – 22, 2026
Virginia Tech
America/New_York timezone

Natural Gradient Descent for Hyperparameter Estimation in Bayesian Inverse Problems

May 19, 2026, 3:45 PM
25m
McBryde Hall 129 (Virginia Tech)

McBryde Hall 129

Virginia Tech

Minisymposium Talk Advanced Acceleration and Convergence Techniques for Solving Linear and Nonlinear Systems Advanced Acceleration and Convergence Techniques for Solving Linear and Nonlinear Systems

Speaker

Elle Buser (Emory University)

Description

We propose a natural gradient descent (NGD) method for efficient hyperparameter estimation in Bayesian inverse problems. In this framework, the objective is formulated as a function of a symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix that depends on the hyperparameters. Rather than optimizing purely in the parameter space, we define a natural gradient that incorporates information about the model space (i.e. the space of SPD matrices) into the gradient descent by equipping the manifold with a Riemannian metric. We consider two metrics, the Log-Cholesky and Log-Euclidean metric, both designed for SPD matrices. Finally, we present a numerical example comparing the performance of NGD based on different metrics to the standard gradient descent.

Authors

Elle Buser (Emory University) Malena Sabate Landman (University of Oxford) Julianne Chung (Emory University) Levon Nurbekyan (Emory University)

Presentation materials

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