Related papers: Black Box Variational Inference
Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…
This paper introduces two variational inference approaches for infinite-dimensional inverse problems, developed through gradient descent with a constant learning rate. The proposed methods enable efficient approximate sampling from the…
Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational distribution.…
We consider Bayesian optimization of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box objective function, where we also have access to cheaper approximations of the objective. In general, such approximations arise in applications such as reinforcement…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…
Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…
Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high-dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework…
Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
We consider a hidden Markov model, where the signal process, given by a diffusion, is only indirectly observed through some noisy measurements. The article develops a variational method for approximating the hidden states of the signal…
Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective means for performing a number of machine learning tasks such as annotation and labelling of images and other data sets. In most early settings of crowdsourcing, the task involved classification,…
A key design constraint when implementing Monte Carlo and variational inference algorithms is that it must be possible to cheaply and exactly evaluate the marginal densities of proposal distributions and variational families. This takes…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
We consider quantile optimization of black-box functions that are estimated with noise. We propose two new iterative three-timescale local search algorithms. The first algorithm uses an appropriately modified finite-difference-based…
We derive and present explicit algorithms to facilitate streamlined computing for variational inference for models containing higher level random effects. Existing literature, such as Lee and Wand (2016), is such that streamlined…
Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…