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Related papers: R\'enyi Divergence Variational Inference

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This paper develops systematic approaches to obtain $f$-divergence inequalities, dealing with pairs of probability measures defined on arbitrary alphabets. Functional domination is one such approach, where special emphasis is placed on…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Igal Sason , Sergio Verdú

We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Bogdan Mazoure , Riashat Islam

The use of latent variable models has shown to be a powerful tool for modeling probability distributions over sequences. In this paper, we introduce a new variational model that extends the recurrent network in two ways for the task of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Haziq Razali , Basura Fernando

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ola Rønning , Eric Nalisnick , Christophe Ley , Padhraic Smyth , Thomas Hamelryck

Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier

Neural networks have become ubiquitous tools for solving signal and image processing problems, and they often outperform standard approaches. Nevertheless, training neural networks is a challenging task in many applications. The prevalent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Patrick L. Combettes , Jean-Christophe Pesquet , Audrey Repetti

Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Nan Feng , Xun Huan

In this paper, we introduce a simplified and unified method for finite-sum convex optimization, named \emph{Variance Reduction via Accelerated Dual Averaging (VRADA)}. In both general convex and strongly convex settings, VRADA can attain an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-09 Chaobing Song , Yong Jiang , Yi Ma

Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been…

We propose Diffusion Model Variational Inference (DMVI), a novel method for automated approximate inference in probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). DMVI utilizes diffusion models as variational approximations to the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Simon Dirmeier , Fernando Perez-Cruz

Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-05 Minh-Ngoc Tran , David J. Nott , Robert Kohn

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have recently regained a significant amount of attention in the deep learning community due to the development of scalable approximate Bayesian inference techniques. There are several advantages of using a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-02 Aliaksandr Hubin , Geir Storvik

We study black-box auditing for machine learning algorithms that claim R \ 'enyi differential privacy (RDP) guarantees. We introduce an auditing framework, based on hypothesis testing, that directly estimates R\'enyi divergence between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Benjamin D. Kim , Lav R. Varshney , Daniel Alabi

In this paper, we provide extended convolution bounds for the Fr\'{e}chet problem and discuss related implications in quantitative risk management. First, we establish a new form of inequality for the Range-Value-at-Risk (RVaR). Based on…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-12-01 Peng Liu , Yang Liu , Houhan Teng

Inverse problems and, in particular, inferring unknown or latent parameters from data are ubiquitous in engineering simulations. A predominant viewpoint in identifying unknown parameters is Bayesian inference where both prior information…

Computation · Statistics 2022-08-31 Vahid Keshavarzzadeh , Robert M. Kirby , Akil Narayan

This paper gives upper and lower bounds on the minimum error probability of Bayesian $M$-ary hypothesis testing in terms of the Arimoto-R\'enyi conditional entropy of an arbitrary order $\alpha$. The improved tightness of these bounds over…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-12-06 Igal Sason , Sergio Verdú

We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kian Ming A. Chai , Edwin V. Bonilla

Stochastic optimization lies at the heart of machine learning, and its cornerstone is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a method introduced over 60 years ago. The last 8 years have seen an exciting new development: variance reduction (VR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-05 Robert M. Gower , Mark Schmidt , Francis Bach , Peter Richtarik

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for bounding the CVaR of a random variable $X$ using another related random variable $Y$, under assumptions on their cumulative and density functions. Our results yield practical tools for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Yaacov Pariente , Vadim Indelman