Related papers: Black Box Variational Inference
Independent or i.i.d. innovations is an essential assumption in the literature for analyzing a vector time series. However, this assumption is either too restrictive for a real-life time series to satisfy or is hard to verify through a…
Variational inference techniques based on inducing variables provide an elegant framework for scalable posterior estimation in Gaussian process (GP) models. Besides enabling scalability, one of their main advantages over sparse…
Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm in the sequential data setting.…
We consider a latent space model for dynamic networks, where our objective is to estimate the pairwise inner products plus the intercept of the latent positions. To balance posterior inference and computational scalability, we consider a…
The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning…
Causal inference and the estimation of causal effects plays a central role in decision-making across many areas, including healthcare and economics. Estimating causal effects typically requires an estimator that is tailored to each problem…
We revisit random search for stochastic optimization, where only noisy function evaluations are available. We show that the method works under weaker smoothness assumptions than previously considered, and that stronger assumptions enable…
We focus on variational inference in dynamical systems where the discrete time transition function (or evolution rule) is modelled by a Gaussian process. The dominant approach so far has been to use a factorised posterior distribution,…
In statistics and machine learning, approximation of an intractable integration is often achieved by using the unbiased Monte Carlo estimator, but the variances of the estimation are generally high in many applications. Control variates…
We exploit the observation that stochastic variational inference (SVI) is a form of annealing and present a modified SVI approach -- applicable to both large and small datasets -- that allows the amount of annealing done by SVI to be tuned.…
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
We derive streamlined mean field variational Bayes algorithms for fitting linear mixed models with crossed random effects. In the most general situation, where the dimensions of the crossed groups are arbitrarily large, streamlining is…
We consider the probabilistic analogue to neural network matrix factorization (Dziugaite & Roy, 2015), which we construct with Bayesian neural networks and fit with variational inference. We find that a linear model fit with variational…
Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…
Linear mixed models are a versatile statistical tool to study data by accounting for fixed effects and random effects from multiple sources of variability. In many situations, a large number of candidate fixed effects is available and it is…
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
Variational inference, as an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, has played a transformative role in enabling scalable computation for complex Bayesian models. Nevertheless, existing approaches often depend on either rigid…
Approximate variational inference has shown to be a powerful tool for modeling unknown complex probability distributions. Recent advances in the field allow us to learn probabilistic models of sequences that actively exploit spatial and…
Unlike the white-box counterparts that are widely studied and readily accessible, adversarial examples in black-box settings are generally more Herculean on account of the difficulty of estimating gradients. Many methods achieve the task by…