Related papers: Proximity Variational Inference
Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…
A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
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…
Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
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…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…
Approximate inference in high-dimensional, discrete probabilistic models is a central problem in computational statistics and machine learning. This paper describes discrete particle variational inference (DPVI), a new approach that…
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…
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…
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…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…
The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…
To infer a function value on a specific point $x$, it is essential to assign higher weights to the points closer to $x$, which is called local polynomial / multivariable regression. In many practical cases, a limited sample size may ruin…
Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…
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…
Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…