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Related papers: Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows

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We introduce a method for reconstructing an infinitesimal normalizing flow given only an infinitesimal change to a (possibly unnormalized) probability distribution. This reverses the conventional task of normalizing flows -- rather than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-04 David Pfau , Danilo Rezende

Normalizing flows, which learn a distribution by transforming the data to samples from a Gaussian base distribution, have proven powerful density approximations. But their expressive power is limited by this choice of the base distribution.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Mike Laszkiewicz , Johannes Lederer , Asja Fischer

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Ilsang Ohn , Lizhen Lin

Normalizing flows have emerged as an important family of deep neural networks for modelling complex probability distributions. In this note, we revisit their coupling and autoregressive transformation layers as probabilistic graphical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Antoine Wehenkel , Gilles Louppe

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Normalizing Flows are generative models which produce tractable distributions where both sampling and density evaluation can be efficient and exact. The goal of this survey article is to give a coherent and comprehensive review of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-09 Ivan Kobyzev , Simon J. D. Prince , Marcus A. Brubaker

Density deconvolution is the task of estimating a probability density function given only noise-corrupted samples. We can fit a Gaussian mixture model to the underlying density by maximum likelihood if the noise is normally distributed, but…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-14 Tim Dockhorn , James A. Ritchie , Yaoliang Yu , Iain Murray

A normalizing flow models a complex probability density as an invertible transformation of a simple density. The invertibility means that we can evaluate densities and generate samples from a flow. In practice, autoregressive flow-based…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-06 Conor Durkan , Artur Bekasov , Iain Murray , George Papamakarios

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

We present an alternative to reweighting techniques for modifying distributions to account for a desired change in an underlying conditional distribution, as is often needed to correct for mis-modelling in a simulated sample. We employ…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2023-05-01 Malte Algren , Tobias Golling , Manuel Guth , Chris Pollard , John Andrew Raine

Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-22 Xuezhen Li , Can M. Le

Normalising-flow variational inference (VI) can approximate complex posteriors, yet single-flow models often behave inconsistently across qualitatively different distributions. We propose Adaptive Mixture Flow Variational Inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Benjamin Wiriyapong , Oktay Karakuş , Kirill Sidorov

Modeling real-world distributions can often be challenging due to sample data that are subjected to perturbations, e.g., instrumentation errors, or added random noise. Since flow models are typically nonlinear algorithms, they amplify these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Sameera Ramasinghe , Kasun Fernando , Salman Khan , Nick Barnes

Popular deterministic approximations of posterior distributions from, e.g. the Laplace method, variational Bayes and expectation-propagation, generally rely on symmetric approximating families, often taken to be Gaussian. This choice…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-19 Francesco Pozza , Daniele Durante , Botond Szabo

Normalizing flows are a powerful tool to create flexible probability distributions with a wide range of potential applications in cosmology. Here we are studying normalizing flows which represent cosmological observables at field level,…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2021-05-26 Adam Rouhiainen , Utkarsh Giri , Moritz Münchmeyer

Amortized inference allows latent-variable models trained via variational learning to scale to large datasets. The quality of approximate inference is determined by two factors: a) the capacity of the variational distribution to match the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Chris Cremer , Xuechen Li , David Duvenaud

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Yingzhi Xia , Qifeng Liao , Jinglai Li

The Bayesian update can be viewed as a variational problem by characterizing the posterior as the minimizer of a functional. The variational viewpoint is far from new and is at the heart of popular methods for posterior approximation.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-11-05 Nicolas Garcia Trillos , Daniel Sanz-Alonso

Obtaining samples from the posterior distribution of inverse problems with expensive forward operators is challenging especially when the unknowns involve the strongly heterogeneous Earth. To meet these challenges, we propose a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-12 Ali Siahkoohi , Gabrio Rizzuti , Mathias Louboutin , Philipp A. Witte , Felix J. Herrmann