Related papers: On some provably correct cases of variational infe…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
Topic models are a useful analysis tool to uncover the underlying themes within document collections. The dominant approach is to use probabilistic topic models that posit a generative story, but in this paper we propose an alternative way…
Topic modelling was mostly dominated by Bayesian graphical models during the last decade. With the rise of transformers in Natural Language Processing, however, several successful models that rely on straightforward clustering approaches in…
In this paper we present a model for unsupervised topic discovery in texts corpora. The proposed model uses documents, words, and topics lookup table embedding as neural network model parameters to build probabilities of words given topics,…
This work focuses on combining nonparametric topic models with Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB). Specifically, we first propose iTM-VAE, where the topics are treated as trainable parameters and the document-specific topic proportions…
We introduce incremental variational inference and apply it to latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Incremental variational inference is inspired by incremental EM and provides an alternative to stochastic variational inference. Incremental…
Probabilistic topic models are widely used to discover latent topics in document collections, while latent feature vector representations of words have been used to obtain high performance in many NLP tasks. In this paper, we extend two…
In an effort to develop topic modeling methods that can be quickly applied to large data sets, we revisit the problem of maximum-likelihood estimation in topic models. It is known, at least informally, that maximum-likelihood estimation in…
We study a parametric family of latent variable models, namely topic models, equipped with a hierarchical structure among the topic variables. Such models may be viewed as a finite mixture of the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) induced…
Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference over large data sets, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of…
Topic models are frequently used in machine learning owing to their high interpretability and modular structure. However, extending a topic model to include a supervisory signal, to incorporate pre-trained word embedding vectors and to…
Visualization and topic modeling are widely used approaches for text analysis. Traditional visualization methods find low-dimensional representations of documents in the visualization space (typically 2D or 3D) that can be displayed using a…
Topic models are evaluated based on their ability to describe documents well (i.e. low perplexity) and to produce topics that carry coherent semantic meaning. In topic modeling so far, perplexity is a direct optimization target. However,…
The problem of topic modeling can be seen as a generalization of the clustering problem, in that it posits that observations are generated due to multiple latent factors (e.g., the words in each document are generated as a mixture of…
Quantifying the data uncertainty in learning tasks is often done by learning a prediction interval or prediction set of the label given the input. Two commonly desired properties for learned prediction sets are \emph{valid coverage} and…
We consider the general problem of modeling temporal data with long-range dependencies, wherein new observations are fully or partially predictable based on temporally-distant, past observations. A sufficiently powerful temporal model…
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.…
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…
The article addresses a long-standing open problem on the justification of using variational Bayes methods for parameter estimation. We provide general conditions for obtaining optimal risk bounds for point estimates acquired from…
Inferring topics from the overwhelming amount of short texts becomes a critical but challenging task for many content analysis tasks, such as content charactering, user interest profiling, and emerging topic detecting. Existing methods such…