Related papers: On some provably correct cases of variational infe…
Variable selection in cluster analysis is important yet challenging. It can be achieved by regularization methods, which realize a trade-off between the clustering accuracy and the number of selected variables by using a lasso-type penalty.…
Generalized latent factor analysis not only provides a useful latent embedding approach in statistics and machine learning, but also serves as a widely used tool across various scientific fields, such as psychometrics, econometrics, and…
In topic modeling, many algorithms that guarantee identifiability of the topics have been developed under the premise that there exist anchor words -- i.e., words that only appear (with positive probability) in one topic. Follow-up work has…
Making sense of words often requires to simultaneously examine the surrounding context of a term as well as the global themes characterizing the overall corpus. Several topic models have already exploited word embeddings to recognize local…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
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…
Model-based approaches bear great promise for decision making of agents interacting with the physical world. In the context of spatial environments, different types of problems such as localisation, mapping, navigation or autonomous…
We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…
Auto-encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB) is a powerful and general algorithm for fitting latent variable models (a promising direction for unsupervised learning), and is well-known for training the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). In this…
Learning guarantees often rely on assumptions of i.i.d. data, which will likely be violated in practice once predictors are deployed to perform real-world tasks. Domain adaptation approaches thus appeared as a useful framework yielding…
Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…
Causal discovery aims to learn causal relationships between variables from targeted data, making it a fundamental task in machine learning. However, causal discovery algorithms often rely on unverifiable causal assumptions, which are…
We propose a parsimonious topic model for text corpora. In related models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), all words are modeled topic-specifically, even though many words occur with similar frequencies across different topics.…
Conditional probabilities are a core concept in machine learning. For example, optimal prediction of a label $Y$ given an input $X$ corresponds to maximizing the conditional probability of $Y$ given $X$. A common approach to inference tasks…
Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…
Exponential tilting is a technique commonly used in fields such as statistics, probability, information theory, and optimization to create parametric distribution shifts. Despite its prevalence in related fields, tilting has not seen…
Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…
Inference for the parameters indexing generalised linear models is routinely based on the assumption that the model is correct and a priori specified. This is unsatisfactory because the chosen model is usually the result of a data-adaptive…
In-context learning for tabular data sets strong predictive standards in observational settings; it however primarily relies on correlational structure, which becomes unreliable under distribution shift or intervention. While established…
We develop flexible methods of deriving variational inference for models with complex latent variable structure. By splitting the variables in these models into "global" parameters and "local" latent variables, we define a class of…