Related papers: An Empirical Study of Stochastic Variational Algor…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…
In the internet era there has been an explosion in the amount of digital text information available, leading to difficulties of scale for traditional inference algorithms for topic models. Recent advances in stochastic variational inference…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…
Group factor analysis (GFA) methods have been widely used to infer the common structure and the group-specific signals from multiple related datasets in various fields including systems biology and neuroimaging. To date, most available GFA…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…
Several approximate inference methods have been proposed for deep discrete latent variable models. However, non-parametric methods which have previously been successfully employed for classical sparse coding models have largely been…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger…
How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models,…
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.…
Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…
Variational Bayes (VB) applied to latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) has become the most popular algorithm for aspect modeling. While sufficiently successful in text topic extraction from large corpora, VB is less successful in identifying…
Recent advances have made it feasible to apply the stochastic variational paradigm to a collapsed representation of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). While the stochastic variational paradigm has successfully been applied to an uncollapsed…
The stochastic variational inference (SVI) paradigm, which combines variational inference, natural gradients, and stochastic updates, was recently proposed for large-scale data analysis in conjugate Bayesian models and demonstrated to be…
We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…