English
Related papers

Related papers: Variational Program Inference

200 papers

Regularization is a common tool in variational inverse problems to impose assumptions on the parameters of the problem. One such assumption is sparsity, which is commonly promoted using lasso and total variation-like regularization.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-02-15 Jasper Marijn Everink , Yiqiu Dong , Martin Skovgaard Andersen

We consider the problem of inference in higher-order undirected graphical models with binary labels. We formulate this problem as a binary polynomial optimization problem and propose several linear programming relaxations for it. We compare…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-17 Aida Khajavirad , Yakun Wang

One of the bottlenecks in robotic intelligence is the instability of neural network models, which, unlike control models, lack a well-defined convergence domain and stability. This leads to risks when applying intelligence in the physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Zihao Liu , Xing Liu , Yizhai Zhang , Zhengxiong Liu , Panfeng Huang

Parameter inference and uncertainty quantification are important steps when relating mathematical models to real-world observations, and when estimating uncertainty in model predictions. However, methods for doing this can be…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-27 Michael J. Plank , Matthew J. Simpson

Inference amortization methods share information across multiple posterior-inference problems, allowing each to be carried out more efficiently. Generally, they require the inversion of the dependency structure in the generative model, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Stefan Webb , Adam Golinski , Robert Zinkov , N. Siddharth , Tom Rainforth , Yee Whye Teh , Frank Wood

In the past years, deep learning models have been successfully applied in several cognitive tasks. Originally inspired by neuroscience, these models are specific examples of differentiable programs. In this paper we define and motivate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Adrián Hernández , Gilles Millerioux , José M. Amigó

We present a novel probabilistic programming framework that couples directly to existing large-scale simulators through a cross-platform probabilistic execution protocol, which allows general-purpose inference engines to record and control…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions given samples from them is well-studied in machine learning and information theory. Motivated by considerations of multi-group fairness, we seek KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Parikshit Gopalan , Nina Narodytska , Omer Reingold , Vatsal Sharan , Udi Wieder

Preference Inference involves inferring additional user preferences from elicited or observed preferences, based on assumptions regarding the form of the user's preference relation. In this paper we consider a situation in which…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Nic Wilson , Anne-Marie George , Barry O'Sullivan

Parameter inference is a fundamental problem in data-driven modeling. Given observed data that is believed to be a realization of some parameterized model, the aim is to find parameter values that are able to explain the observed data. In…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-04-20 Carlo Albert , Simone Ulzega , Ruedi Stoop

Learning and inference movement is a very challenging problem due to its high dimensionality and dependency to varied environments or tasks. In this paper, we propose an effective probabilistic method for learning and inference of basic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Mingxuan Jing , Xiaojian Ma , Fuchun Sun , Huaping Liu

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Sergei Volodin , Nevan Wichers , Jeremy Nixon

Instrumental variable methods are among the most commonly used causal inference approaches to deal with unmeasured confounders in observational studies. The presence of invalid instruments is the primary concern for practical applications,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-18 Zijian Guo

Inferring the causal direction between two variables from their observation data is one of the most fundamental and challenging topics in data science. A causal direction inference algorithm maps the observation data into a binary value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Yulai Zhang , Jiachen Wang , Gang Cen , Guiming Luo

Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-29 Robert Bamler , Cheng Zhang , Manfred Opper , Stephan Mandt

Model Predictive Control evolved as the state of the art paradigm for safety critical control tasks. Control-as-Inference approaches thereof model the constrained optimization problem as a probabilistic inference problem. The constraints…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Jörn Tebbe , Andreas Besginow , Markus Lange-Hegermann

We present vir, an R package for variational inference with shrinkage priors. Our package implements variational and stochastic variational algorithms for linear and probit regression models, the use of which is a common first step in many…

Computation · Statistics 2021-02-18 Suchit Mehrotra , Arnab Maity

Denoising diffusion models have driven significant progress in the field of Bayesian inverse problems. Recent approaches use pre-trained diffusion models as priors to solve a wide range of such problems, only leveraging inference-time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-06 Yazid Janati , Badr Moufad , Mehdi Abou El Qassime , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson

Generative AI has achieved remarkable empirical success, but from the perspective of statistics it often remains opaque: its predictions may be accurate, yet the underlying mechanism is difficult to interpret, analyze, and trust. This book…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Shinto Eguchi