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Related papers: Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference

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We present a new algorithm for approximate inference in probabilistic programs, based on a stochastic gradient for variational programs. This method is efficient without restrictions on the probabilistic program; it is particularly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-01-08 David Wingate , Theophane Weber

Automatic differentiation (AD), a technique for constructing new programs which compute the derivative of an original program, has become ubiquitous throughout scientific computing and deep learning due to the improved performance afforded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Gaurav Arya , Moritz Schauer , Frank Schäfer , Chris Rackauckas

Derivatives, mostly in the form of gradients and Hessians, are ubiquitous in machine learning. Automatic differentiation (AD), also called algorithmic differentiation or simply "autodiff", is a family of techniques similar to but more…

Symbolic Computation · Computer Science 2018-07-18 Atilim Gunes Baydin , Barak A. Pearlmutter , Alexey Andreyevich Radul , Jeffrey Mark Siskind

Algorithmic differentiation (AD) has become increasingly capable and straightforward to use. However, AD is inefficient when applied directly to solvers, a feature of most engineering analyses. We can leverage implicit differentiation to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-28 Andrew Ning , Taylor McDonnell

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 David M. Blei , Alp Kucukelbir , Jon D. McAuliffe

Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-10 Maria I. Gorinova , Dave Moore , Matthew D. Hoffman

Automatic differentiation, also known as backpropagation, AD, autodiff, or algorithmic differentiation, is a popular technique for computing derivatives of computer programs accurately and efficiently. Sometimes, however, the derivatives…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-05-15 Jan Hückelheim , Harshitha Menon , William Moses , Bruce Christianson , Paul Hovland , Laurent Hascoët

We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Wasu Top Piriyakulkij , Yingheng Wang , Volodymyr Kuleshov

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

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…

An artificial intelligence (AI) model can be viewed as a function that maps inputs to outputs in high-dimensional spaces. Once designed and well trained, the AI model is applied for inference. However, even optimized AI models can produce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Sha Hu

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-26 Yash Patel , Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier , Ambuj Tewari

Artificial intelligence has recently experienced remarkable advances, fueled by large models, vast datasets, accelerated hardware, and, last but not least, the transformative power of differentiable programming. This new programming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Mathieu Blondel , Vincent Roulet

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Seunghyeon Kim , Kwangmin Lee , Yeonhee Park

Regression or classification? This is perhaps the most basic question faced when tackling a new supervised learning problem. We present an Evolutionary Deep Learning (EDL) algorithm that automatically solves this by identifying the question…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-07-05 Emmanuel Dufourq , Bruce A. Bassett

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-27 Aurya S. Javeed , Drew P. Kouri , Thomas M. Surowiec

Derivatives play a critical role in computational statistics, examples being Bayesian inference using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling and the training of neural networks. Automatic differentiation is a powerful tool to automate the…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2019-03-27 Charles C. Margossian