Related papers: Black Box Variational Inference
Bayesian methods are particularly effective for addressing inverse problems due to their ability to manage uncertainties inherent in the inference process. However, employing these methods with costly forward models poses significant…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
Black box variational inference allows researchers to easily prototype and evaluate an array of models. Recent advances allow such algorithms to scale to high dimensions. However, a central question remains: How to specify an expressive…
While stochastic variational inference is relatively well known for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models, related methods also offer ways to circumnavigate the approximation of analytically intractable expectations. The key…
Recent advances in coreset methods have shown that a selection of representative datapoints can replace massive volumes of data for Bayesian inference, preserving the relevant statistical information and significantly accelerating…
For many decades now, Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) has been a popular framework to systematically account for model uncertainty that arises in situations when multiple competing models are available to describe the same or similar…
Latent variable time-series models are among the most heavily used tools from machine learning and applied statistics. These models have the advantage of learning latent structure both from noisy observations and from the temporal ordering…
We propose a black-box variational inference method to approximate intractable distributions with an increasingly rich approximating class. Our method, termed variational boosting, iteratively refines an existing variational approximation…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…
Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…
Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (VBMC) is a recently introduced framework that uses Gaussian process surrogates to perform approximate Bayesian inference in models with black-box, non-cheap likelihoods. In this work, we extend VBMC to deal…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…
Black Box Variational Inference is a promising framework in a succession of recent efforts to make Variational Inference more ``black box". However, in basic version it either fails to converge due to instability or requires some…
Black-box variational inference performance is sometimes hindered by the use of gradient estimators with high variance. This variance comes from two sources of randomness: Data subsampling and Monte Carlo sampling. While existing control…
Variational inference provides approximations to the computationally intractable posterior distribution in Bayesian networks. A prominent medical application of noisy-or Bayesian network is to infer potential diseases given observed…
Many computationally-efficient methods for Bayesian deep learning rely on continuous optimization algorithms, but the implementation of these methods requires significant changes to existing code-bases. In this paper, we propose Vprop, a…
Black-box variational inference is widely used in situations where there is no proof that its stochastic optimization succeeds. We suggest this is due to a theoretical gap in existing stochastic optimization proofs: namely the challenge of…
Many problems in machine learning are naturally expressed in the language of undirected graphical models. Here, we propose black-box learning and inference algorithms for undirected models that optimize a variational approximation to the…