Related papers: R\'enyi Divergence Variational Inference
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…
Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…
We introduce a new variational inference (VI) framework, called energetic variational inference (EVI). It minimizes the VI objective function based on a prescribed energy-dissipation law. Using the EVI framework, we can derive many existing…
We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…
Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…
In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…
This paper provides tight bounds on the R\'enyi entropy of a function of a discrete random variable with a finite number of possible values, where the considered function is not one-to-one. To that end, a tight lower bound on the R\'enyi…
Stochastic first-order methods for empirical risk minimization employ gradient approximations based on sampled data in lieu of exact gradients. Such constructions introduce noise into the learning dynamics, which can be corrected through…
Hierarchical models represent a challenging setting for inference algorithms. MCMC methods struggle to scale to large models with many local variables and observations, and variational inference (VI) may fail to provide accurate…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…
Recursive Bayesian inference (RBI) provides optimal Bayesian latent variable estimates in real-time settings with streaming noisy observations. Active RBI attempts to effectively select queries that lead to more informative observations to…
Recent variational inference methods use stochastic gradient estimators whose variance is not well understood. Theoretical guarantees for these estimators are important to understand when these methods will or will not work. This paper…
Vector autoregressions (VARs) are a widely used tool for modelling multivariate time-series. It is common to assume a VAR is stationary; this can be enforced by imposing the stationarity condition which restricts the parameter space of the…
Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference over large data sets, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of…
This work explores properties of Strong Data-Processing constants for R\'enyi Divergences. Parallels are made with the well-studied $\varphi$-Divergences, and it is shown that the order $\alpha$ of R\'enyi Divergences dictates whether…
This paper introduces "swiveled Renyi entropies" as an alternative to the Renyi entropic quantities put forward in [Berta et al., Phys. Rev. A 91, 022333 (2015)]. What distinguishes the swiveled Renyi entropies from the prior proposal of…
This paper presents a novel theoretical study of the general problem of multiple source adaptation using the notion of Renyi divergence. Our results build on our previous work [12], but significantly broaden the scope of that work in…
Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We believe a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce…
In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…