Related papers: Extreme Stochastic Variational Inference: Distribu…
The support vector machine (SVM) is a widely used method for classification. Although many efforts have been devoted to develop efficient solvers, it remains challenging to apply SVM to large-scale problems. A nice property of SVM is that…
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…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…
Composition optimization has drawn a lot of attention in a wide variety of machine learning domains from risk management to reinforcement learning. Existing methods solving the composition optimization problem often work in a sequential and…
Random feature latent variable models (RFLVMs) represent the state-of-the-art in latent variable models, capable of handling non-Gaussian likelihoods and effectively uncovering patterns in high-dimensional data. However, their heavy…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) has been introduced to expand the analytical variational families by defining expressive semi-implicit distributions in a hierarchical manner. However, the single-layer architecture commonly used…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
In stochastic variational inference, the variational Bayes objective function is optimized using stochastic gradient approximation, where gradients computed on small random subsets of data are used to approximate the true gradient over the…
Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…
We consider distributed stochastic variational inequalities (VIs) on unbounded domains with the problem data that is heterogeneous (non-IID) and distributed across many devices. We make a very general assumption on the computational network…
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…
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…
Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
We present a Gaussian Variational Inference (GVI) technique that can be applied to large-scale nonlinear batch state estimation problems. The main contribution is to show how to fit both the mean and (inverse) covariance of a Gaussian to…
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…
We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…
Scalable algorithms of posterior approximation allow Bayesian nonparametrics such as Dirichlet process mixture to scale up to larger dataset at fractional cost. Recent algorithms, notably the stochastic variational inference performs local…
In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…