Related papers: Boosting Variational Inference
Variational Bayes (VB) is a recent approximate method for Bayesian inference. It has the merit of being a fast and scalable alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) but its approximation error is often unknown. In this paper, we…
Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…
Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…
Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…
As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…
We provide statistical guarantees for Bayesian variational boosting by proposing a novel small bandwidth Gaussian mixture variational family. We employ a functional version of Frank-Wolfe optimization as our variational algorithm and study…
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…
Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would…
We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…
Given some observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference aims at obtaining the distribution of a model's latent parameters that could have yielded the data. This task is challenging for large population studies…
Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…
Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…
Variational approximation methods have proven to be useful for scaling Bayesian computations to large data sets and highly parametrized models. Applying variational methods involves solving an optimization problem, and recent research in…
We propose a robust and scalable framework for variational Bayes (VB) that effectively handles outliers and contamination of arbitrary nature in large datasets. Our approach divides the dataset into disjoint subsets, computes the posterior…
Bayesian inference offers benefits over maximum likelihood, but it also comes with computational costs. Computing the posterior is typically intractable, as is marginalizing that posterior to form the posterior predictive distribution. In…
A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…
We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived…
To obtain uncertainty estimates with real-world Bayesian deep learning models, practical inference approximations are needed. Dropout variational inference (VI) for example has been used for machine vision and medical applications, but VI…
We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…