Related papers: Variational Inference via $\chi$-Upper Bound Minim…
With the advancements of computer architectures, the use of computational models proliferates to solve complex problems in many scientific applications such as nuclear physics and climate research. However, the potential of such models is…
Approximate inference algorithm is one of the fundamental research fields in machine learning. The two dominant theoretical inference frameworks in machine learning are variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…
This paper describes an approach to simultaneously identify clusters and estimate cluster-specific regression parameters from the given data. Such an approach can be useful in learning the relationship between input and output when the…
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…
Reconstructing the evolutionary history relating a collection of molecular sequences is the main subject of modern Bayesian phylogenetic inference. However, the commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be inefficient due to the…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…
The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and 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 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…
Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…
Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…
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…
Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…
Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…
Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…
We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…
We propose an optimization algorithm for Variational Inference (VI) in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates where the variational space is a Riemann manifold. We develop an efficient algorithm for Gaussian…
We introduce a highly expressive yet distinctly tractable family for black-box variational inference (BBVI). Each member of this family is a weighted product of experts (PoE), and each weighted expert in the product is proportional to a…
The expected value of information (EVI) is the most powerful measure of sensitivity to uncertainty in a decision model: it measures the potential of information to improve the decision, and hence measures the expected value of outcome.…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…