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

We consider the inverse Ising problem, i.e. the inference of network couplings from observed spin trajectories for a model with continuous time Glauber dynamics. By introducing two sets of auxiliary latent random variables we render the…

Future wireless networks are envisioned to provide ubiquitous sensing services, which also gives rise to a substantial demand for high-dimensional non-convex parameter estimation, i.e., the associated likelihood function is non-convex and…

Bayesian estimation is increasingly popular for performing model based inference to support policymaking. These data are often collected from surveys under informative sampling designs where subject inclusion probabilities are designed to…

Deep latent variable models (DLVMs) combine the approximation abilities of deep neural networks and the statistical foundations of generative models. Variational methods are commonly used for inference; however, the exact likelihood of…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While prior work has emphasized algorithmic design, data curation, and reward shaping, we investigate…

We introduce factorize sum split product networks (FSPNs), a new class of probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). FSPNs are designed to overcome the drawbacks of existing PGMs in terms of estimation accuracy and inference efficiency.…

We consider higher-order linear-chain conditional random fields (HO-LC-CRFs) for sequence modelling, and use sum-product networks (SPNs) for representing higher-order input- and output-dependent factors. SPNs are a recently introduced class…

We introduce the Locally Linear Latent Variable Model (LL-LVM), a probabilistic model for non-linear manifold discovery that describes a joint distribution over observations, their manifold coordinates and locally linear maps conditioned on…

Accurately quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their reliable deployment, especially in high-stakes applications. Current state-of-the-art methods for measuring semantic uncertainty in LLMs rely on strict…

Algorithms for learning the conditional probabilities of Bayesian networks with hidden variables typically operate within a high-dimensional search space and yield only locally optimal solutions. One way of limiting the search space and…

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are naturally suited for speech processing tasks due to their specific dynamics, which allows them to handle temporal data. However, the threshold-based generation of spikes in SNNs intuitively causes an…

Bayes' rule describes how to infer posterior beliefs about latent variables given observations, and inference is a critical step in learning algorithms for latent variable models (LVMs). Although there are exact algorithms for inference and…

Large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning problems by first generating a rationale and then answering. We formalize reasoning as a latent variable model and derive a reward-based filtered expectation-maximization (FEM) objective for…

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), or Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have shown impressive capabilities in a wide range of visual tasks. However, they often struggle with fine-grained visual reasoning, failing to identify domain-specific…

Latent variable models are powerful statistical tools that can uncover relevant variation between patients or cells, by inferring unobserved hidden states from observable high-dimensional data. A major shortcoming of current methods,…

The soft-margin support vector machine (SVM) is a ubiquitous tool for prediction of binary-response data. However, the SVM is characterized entirely via a numerical optimization problem, rather than a probability model, and thus does not…

According to conventional neural network theories, the feature of single-hidden-layer feedforward neural networks(SLFNs) resorts to parameters of the weighted connections and hidden nodes. SLFNs are universal approximators when at least the…

For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…

State-space models (SSMs) offer a powerful framework for dynamical system analysis, wherein the temporal dynamics of the system are assumed to be captured through the evolution of the latent states, which govern the values of the…

Although the expectation maximisation (EM) algorithm was introduced in 1970, it remains somewhat inaccessible to machine learning practitioners due to its obscure notation, terse proofs and lack of concrete links to modern machine learning…