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Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Thomas Guilmeau , Hadrien Hendrikx , Florence Forbes

The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Jay Whang , Stefano Ermon

The expressiveness of flow-based models combined with stochastic variational inference (SVI) has expanded the application of optimization-based Bayesian inference to highly complex problems. However, despite the importance of multi-model…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-17 Laurence Davies , Dan Mackinlay , Rafael Oliveira , Scott A. Sisson

Neural simulation-based inference (SBI) is a popular set of methods for Bayesian inference when models are only available in the form of a simulator. These methods are widely used in the sciences and engineering, where writing down a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-15 Yuga Hikida , Ayush Bharti , Niall Jeffrey , François-Xavier Briol

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-29 Amar Shah , David A. Knowles , Zoubin Ghahramani

Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-20 Tim Salimans , Diederik P. Kingma , Max Welling

In order to predict future performance of subsurface fluid reservoirs under possible operating scenarios, a dynamic, porous-medium flow simulation model must be tuned to include representative properties of the reservoir. Estimating…

Geophysics · Physics 2026-02-04 Zhen Zhang , Xuebin Zhao , Andrew Curtis

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-29 Alexander Moreno , Tameem Adel , Edward Meeds , James M. Rehg , Max Welling

Gradient-based Monte Carlo sampling algorithms, like Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, are important methods for Bayesian inference. In large-scale settings, full-gradients are not affordable and thus stochastic gradients…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Zhize Li , Tianyi Zhang , Shuyu Cheng , Jun Zhu , Jian Li

We introduce a new Bayesian multi-class support vector machine by formulating a pseudo-likelihood for a multi-class hinge loss in the form of a location-scale mixture of Gaussians. We derive a variational-inference-based training objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Martin Wistuba , Ambrish Rawat

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-24 Yvann Le Fay , Nicolas Chopin , Simon Barthelmé

Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…

Frequentist and likelihood methods of inference based on the multivariate skew-normal model encounter several technical difficulties with this model. In spite of the popularity of this class of densities, there are no broadly satisfactory…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-02-06 Brunero Liseo , Antonio Parisi

Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-03 Dingbo Wu , Fangzheng Xie

Stein variational inference (SVI) is a sample-based approximate Bayesian inference technique that generates a sample set by jointly optimizing the samples' locations to minimize an information-theoretic measure of discrepancy with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Liam Pavlovic , David M. Rosen

Gaussian and discrete non-Gaussian spatial datasets are common across fields like public health, ecology, geosciences, and social sciences. Bayesian spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) are a flexible class of models for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-27 Jin Hyung Lee , Ben Seiyon Lee

Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Cristian Parra-Aldana , Juan Sosa

Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm in the sequential data setting.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-08 Pengyu Wang , Phil Blunsom