Related papers: The Bayesian update: variational formulations and …
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…
The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…
Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…
We consider the statistical inverse problem of estimating a background flow field (e.g., of air or water) from the partial and noisy observation of a passive scalar (e.g., the concentration of a solute), a common experimental approach to…
While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive datasets is often challenging, when possible at all. Indeed, the classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the…
Bayesian posterior inference is prevalent in various machine learning problems. Variational inference provides one way to approximate the posterior distribution, however its expressive power is limited and so is the accuracy of resulting…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…
Uncertainty propagation and filtering can be interpreted as gradient flows with respect to suitable metrics in the infinite dimensional manifold of probability density functions. Such a viewpoint has been put forth in recent literature, and…
Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…
In the bayesian analysis of Inverse Problems most relevant cases the forward maps (FM, or regressor function) are defined in terms of a system of (O, P)DE's with intractable solutions. These necessarily involve a numerical method to find…
Model Updating is frequently used in Structural Health Monitoring to determine structures' operating conditions and whether maintenance is required. Data collected by sensors are used to update the values of some initially unknown…
Motivated by a constrained minimization problem, it is studied the gradient flows with respect to Hessian Riemannian metrics induced by convex functions of Legendre type. The first result characterizes Hessian Riemannian structures on…
In this paper we focus on the linear functionals defining an approximate version of the gradient of a function. These functionals are often used when dealing with optimization problems where the computation of the gradient of the objective…
We present a continuation method that entails generating a sequence of transition probability density functions from the prior to the posterior in the context of Bayesian inference for parameter estimation problems. The characterization of…
Normalizing flows are a powerful tool for generative modelling, density estimation and posterior reconstruction in Bayesian inverse problems. In this paper, we introduce proximal residual flows, a new architecture of normalizing flows.…
The past decades have seen enormous improvements in computational inference based on statistical models, with continual enhancement in a wide range of computational tools, in competition. In Bayesian inference, first and foremost, MCMC…
Sampling a probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational science and engineering. This task may be cast as an optimization problem over all probability measures, and an initial…
We propose a variational form of the BDF2 method as an alternative to the commonly used minimizing movement scheme for the time-discrete approximation of gradient flows in abstract metric spaces. Assuming uniform semi-convexity --- but no…
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…