Related papers: On the Latent Variable Interpretation in Sum-Produ…

Real-world decision-making, from tax compliance assessment to medical diagnosis, requires aggregating multiple noisy and potentially contradictory evidence sources. Existing approaches either lack explicit uncertainty quantification (neural…

State-space models (SSMs) are powerful probabilistic tools for modeling time-varying systems with latent dynamics. Inference in SSMs involves the estimation of latent states and parameters. In this work, we focus on parameter inference,…

Expectation maximisation (EM) is an unsupervised learning method for estimating the parameters of a finite mixture distribution. It works by introducing "hidden" or "latent" variables via Baum's auxiliary function $Q$ that allow the joint…

Latent variable models (LVMs) represent observed variables by parameterized functions of latent variables. Prominent examples of LVMs for unsupervised learning are probabilistic PCA or probabilistic SC which both assume a weighted linear…

A semi-parametric, non-linear regression model in the presence of latent variables is applied towards learning network graph structure. These latent variables can correspond to unmodeled phenomena or unmeasured agents in a complex system of…

What types of numeric representations emerge in neural systems, and what would a satisfying answer to this question look like? In this work, we interpret Neural Network (NN) solutions to sequence based number tasks using a variety of…

Probability estimation of tree topologies is one of the fundamental tasks in phylogenetic inference. The recently proposed subsplit Bayesian networks (SBNs) provide a powerful probabilistic graphical model for tree topology probability…

Hierarchical learning models, such as mixture models and Bayesian networks, are widely employed for unsupervised learning tasks, such as clustering analysis. They consist of observable and hidden variables, which represent the given data…

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…

Sentence representations are foundational to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. While recent methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive sentence representations, most rely on final-layer hidden states, which…

The Variational Bayesian method (VB) is used to solve the probability distributions of latent variables with the minimum free energy criterion. This criterion is not easy to understand, and the computation is complex. For these reasons,…

For recurrent neural networks trained on time series with target and exogenous variables, in addition to accurate prediction, it is also desired to provide interpretable insights into the data. In this paper, we explore the structure of…

In this thesis, we develop methods to enhance the interpretability of recent representation learning techniques in natural language processing (NLP) while accounting for the unavailability of annotated data. We choose to leverage…

Applications of structural equation models (SEMs) are often restricted to linear associations between variables. Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation in non-linear models may be complex and require numerical integration. Furthermore, ML…

Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) are a class of expressive yet tractable hierarchical graphical models. LearnSPN is a structure learning algorithm for SPNs that uses hierarchical co-clustering to simultaneously identifying similar entities and…

It is now widely accepted that knowledge can be acquired from networks by clustering their vertices according to connection profiles. Many methods have been proposed and in this paper we concentrate on the Stochastic Block Model (SBM). The…

We present a novel tractable generative model that extends Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) and significantly boosts their power. We call it Sum-Product-Quotient Networks (SPQNs), whose core concept is to incorporate conditional distributions…

Large language models (LLMs) effectively generate fluent text when the target output follows natural language patterns. However, structured prediction tasks confine the output format to a limited ontology, causing even very large models to…

We introduce Graph-Induced Sum-Product Networks (GSPNs), a new probabilistic framework for graph representation learning that can tractably answer probabilistic queries. Inspired by the computational trees induced by vertices in the context…

This paper introduces a systematic approach to synthesize linear parameter-varying (LPV) representations of nonlinear (NL) systems which are described by input affine state-space (SS) representations. The conversion approach results in…