Related papers: Stochastic Backpropagation through Mixture Density…
How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
While stochastic variational inference is relatively well known for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models, related methods also offer ways to circumnavigate the approximation of analytically intractable expectations. The key…
Particle filters flexibly represent multiple posterior modes nonparametrically, via a collection of weighted samples, but have classically been applied to tracking problems with known dynamics and observation likelihoods. Such generative…
We introduce a family of pairwise stochastic gradient estimators for gradients of expectations, which are related to the log-derivative trick, but involve pairwise interactions between samples. The simplest example of our new estimator,…
Stochastic neurons and hard non-linearities can be useful for a number of reasons in deep learning models, but in many cases they pose a challenging problem: how to estimate the gradient of a loss function with respect to the input of such…
Optimization with noisy gradients has become ubiquitous in statistics and machine learning. Reparameterization gradients, or gradient estimates computed via the "reparameterization trick," represent a class of noisy gradients often used in…
Back-propagation has been the workhorse of recent successes of deep learning but it relies on infinitesimal effects (partial derivatives) in order to perform credit assignment. This could become a serious issue as one considers deeper and…
Stein's method (Stein, 1973; 1981) is a powerful tool for statistical applications and has significantly impacted machine learning. Stein's lemma plays an essential role in Stein's method. Previous applications of Stein's lemma either…
Stochastic neurons can be useful for a number of reasons in deep learning models, but in many cases they pose a challenging problem: how to estimate the gradient of a loss function with respect to the input of such stochastic neurons, i.e.,…
The reparameterization trick has become one of the most useful tools in the field of variational inference. However, the reparameterization trick is based on the standardization transformation which restricts the scope of application of…
We develop a scalable deep non-parametric generative model by augmenting deep Gaussian processes with a recognition model. Inference is performed in a novel scalable variational framework where the variational posterior distributions are…
While backpropagation--reverse-mode automatic differentiation--has been extraordinarily successful in deep learning, it requires two passes (forward and backward) through the neural network and the storage of intermediate activations.…
Probabilistic models with discrete latent variables naturally capture datasets composed of discrete classes. However, they are difficult to train efficiently, since backpropagation through discrete variables is generally not possible. We…
The Backprop algorithm for learning in neural networks utilizes two mechanisms: first, stochastic gradient descent and second, initialization with small random weights, where the latter is essential to the effectiveness of the former. We…
Stochastic variational inference algorithms are derived for fitting various heteroskedastic time series models. We examine Gaussian, t, and skew-t response GARCH models and fit these using Gaussian variational approximating densities. We…
We investigate a local reparameterizaton technique for greatly reducing the variance of stochastic gradients for variational Bayesian inference (SGVB) of a posterior over model parameters, while retaining parallelizability. This local…
While mixtures of Gaussian distributions have been studied for more than a century (Pearson, 1894), the construction of a reference Bayesian analysis of those models still remains unsolved, with a general prohibition of the usage of…
Reparameterization aims to improve the generalization of deep neural networks by transforming convolutional layers into equivalent multi-branched structures during training. However, there exists a gap in understanding how…
We consider the problem of estimating complex statistical latent variable models using variational Bayes methods. These methods are used when exact posterior inference is either infeasible or computationally expensive, and they approximate…
Estimating the gradients of stochastic nodes in stochastic computational graphs is one of the crucial research questions in the deep generative modeling community, which enables the gradient descent optimization on neural network…