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Related papers: Boosting Variational Inference

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Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Minyoung Kim

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

Variational Bayes methods approximate the posterior density by a family of tractable distributions whose parameters are estimated by optimisation. Variational approximation is useful when exact inference is intractable or very costly. Our…

Computation · Statistics 2023-08-15 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , David Nott

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

Variational inference (VI) is a central tool in modern machine learning, used to approximate an intractable target density by optimising over a tractable family of distributions. As the variational family cannot typically represent the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Daniel Marks , Dario Paccagnan , Mark van der Wilk

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Tim Reichelt , Luke Ong , Tom Rainforth

Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference, and it has been recently applied for representation learning with deep generative models. We develop the variational Gaussian process (VGP), a Bayesian nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-19 Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

We introduce a class of generic spike-and-slab priors for high-dimensional linear regression with grouped variables and present a Coordinate-ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for obtaining an optimal variational Bayes…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-02 Buyu Lin , Changhao Ge , Jun S. Liu

Variational Bayes is a popular method for approximate inference but its derivation can be cumbersome. To simplify the process, we give a 3-step recipe to identify the posterior form by explicitly looking for linearity with respect to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high-dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-03 Chirag Modi , Diana Cai , Lawrence K. Saul

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Shitao Fan , Ilsang Ohn , David Dunson , Lizhen Lin

Due to their uncertainty quantification, Bayesian solutions to inverse problems are the framework of choice in applications that are risk averse. These benefits come at the cost of computations that are in general, intractable. New advances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Rafael Orozco , Ali Siahkoohi , Mathias Louboutin , Felix J. Herrmann

Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Didrik Nielsen

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

Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Bohan Wu , David Blei

In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Charles C. Margossian , David M. Blei

Most leading implementations of black-box variational inference (BBVI) are based on optimizing a stochastic evidence lower bound (ELBO). But such approaches to BBVI often converge slowly due to the high variance of their gradient estimates…

We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…