Related papers: Black Box Variational Inference
Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…
Black-box alpha (BB-$\alpha$) is a new approximate inference method based on the minimization of $\alpha$-divergences. BB-$\alpha$ scales to large datasets because it can be implemented using stochastic gradient descent. BB-$\alpha$ can be…
Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…
Variational inference is a general approach for approximating complex density functions, such as those arising in latent variable models, popular in machine learning. It has been applied to approximate the maximum likelihood estimator and…
Simulations are becoming ever more common as a tool for designing complex products. Sensitivity analysis techniques can be applied to these simulations to gain insight, or to reduce the complexity of the problem at hand. However, these…
Variational inference methods often focus on the problem of efficient model optimization, with little emphasis on the choice of the approximating posterior. In this paper, we review and implement the various methods that enable us to…
Factorization machines (FMs) are a powerful tool for regression and classification in the context of sparse observations, that has been successfully applied to collaborative filtering, especially when side information over users or items is…
We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models,…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…
We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…
We investigate the optimization of two probabilistic generative models with binary latent variables using a novel variational EM approach. The approach distinguishes itself from previous variational approaches by using latent states as…
Recent works have shown that deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples that find samples close to the original image but can make the model misclassify. Even with access only to the model's output, an attacker can employ…
Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…
Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…
We implement gradient-based variational inference routines for Wishart and inverse Wishart processes, which we apply as Bayesian models for the dynamic, heteroskedastic covariance matrix of a multivariate time series. The Wishart and…
Undirected graphical models are applied in genomics, protein structure prediction, and neuroscience to identify sparse interactions that underlie discrete data. Although Bayesian methods for inference would be favorable in these contexts,…
Dynamic factor models are often estimated by point-estimation methods, disregarding parameter uncertainty. We propose a method accounting for parameter uncertainty by means of posterior approximation, using variational inference. Our…
Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…
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…