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Related papers: Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows

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A new approach of obtaining stratified random samples from statistically dependent random variables is described. The proposed method can be used to obtain samples from the input space of a computer forward model in estimating expectations…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-25 Anirban Mondal , Abhijit Mandal

The distinctive architectural features of normalizing flows (NFs), notably bijectivity and tractable Jacobians, make them well-suited for generative modeling. Invertible neural networks (INNs) build on these principles to address supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Mohammad Javad Khojasteh , Ananya Acharya , Tony Tohme , Kamal Youcef-Toumi

Normalizing flows model complex probability distributions by combining a base distribution with a series of bijective neural networks. State-of-the-art architectures rely on coupling and autoregressive transformations to lift up invertible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Antoine Wehenkel , Gilles Louppe

Solving inverse problems involving measurement noise and modeling errors requires regularization in order to avoid data overfit. Geophysical inverse problems, in which the Earth's highly heterogeneous structure is unknown, present a…

Geophysics · Physics 2022-03-31 Ali Siahkoohi , Rafael Orozco , Gabrio Rizzuti , Felix J. Herrmann

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

In this study, we use Rational-Quadratic Neural Spline Flows, a sophisticated parametrization of Normalizing Flows, for inferring posterior probability distributions in scenarios where direct evaluation of the likelihood is challenging at…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2024-01-26 Mathias El Baz , Federico Sánchez

Estimation of parameters that obey specific constraints is crucial in statistics and machine learning; for example, when parameters are required to satisfy boundedness, monotonicity, or linear inequalities. Traditional approaches impose…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-03 Lachlan Astfalck , Deborshee Sen , Sayan Patra , Edward Cripps , David Dunson

It is difficult to use subsampling with variational inference in hierarchical models since the number of local latent variables scales with the dataset. Thus, inference in hierarchical models remains a challenge at large scale. It is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Abhinav Agrawal , Justin Domke

Normalising flows are tractable probabilistic models that leverage the power of deep learning to describe a wide parametric family of distributions, all while remaining trainable using maximum likelihood. We discuss how these methods can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Simon Alexanderson , Gustav Eje Henter

Inference for GP models with non-Gaussian noises is computationally expensive when dealing with large datasets. Many recent inference methods approximate the posterior distribution with a simpler distribution defined on a small number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Linfeng Liu , Liping Liu

Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-03 Giovanni Piccirilli , Aluísio Pinheiro

Normalizing flows transform a simple base distribution into a complex target distribution and have proved to be powerful models for data generation and density estimation. In this work, we propose a novel type of normalizing flow driven by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Ruizhi Deng , Bo Chang , Marcus A. Brubaker , Greg Mori , Andreas Lehrmann

Explicit density learners are becoming an increasingly popular technique for generative models because of their ability to better model probability distributions. They have advantages over Generative Adversarial Networks due to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Steven Walton , Valeriy Klyukin , Maksim Artemev , Denis Derkach , Nikita Orlov , Humphrey Shi

We propose a method to approximate the distribution of robot configurations satisfying multiple objectives. Our approach uses variational inference, a popular method in Bayesian computation, which has several advantages over sampling-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Emmanuel Pignat , Teguh Lembono , Sylvain Calinon

We establish a novel convergent iteration framework for a weak approximation of general switching diffusion. The key theoretical basis of the proposed approach is a restriction of the maximum number of switching so as to untangle and…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-07-06 Qinjing Qiu , Reiichiro Kawai

Traditional approaches to variational inference rely on parametric families of variational distributions, with the choice of family playing a critical role in determining the accuracy of the resulting posterior approximation. Simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-27 Martin Jankowiak , Du Phan

The mean field methods, which entail approximating intractable probability distributions variationally with distributions from a tractable family, enjoy high efficiency, guaranteed convergence, and provide lower bounds on the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Eric P. Xing , Michael I. Jordan , Stuart Russell

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)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

An approximation method is presented for probabilistic inference with continuous random variables. These problems can arise in many practical problems, in particular where there are "second order" probabilities. The approximation, based on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-10 Ross D. Shachter