Related papers: Proximity Variational Inference
Bayesian deep learning plays an important role especially for its ability evaluating epistemic uncertainty (EU). Due to computational complexity issues, approximation methods such as variational inference (VI) have been used in practice to…
We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…
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…
Mean-field variational inference is one of the most popular approaches to inference in discrete random fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. Thus, in practice,…
Highly expressive directed latent variable models, such as sigmoid belief networks, are difficult to train on large datasets because exact inference in them is intractable and none of the approximate inference methods that have been applied…
Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Recent advances in neural density estimation have enabled powerful simulation-based inference (SBI) methods that can flexibly approximate Bayesian inference for intractable stochastic models. Although these methods have demonstrated…
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…
We present an approximate inference method, based on a synergistic combination of R\'enyi $\alpha$-divergence variational inference (RDVI) and rejection sampling (RS). RDVI is based on minimization of R\'enyi $\alpha$-divergence…
This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger…
The recently developed Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods drive the empirical distribution of a set of \emph{fixed-weight} particles towards a given target distribution $\pi$ by iteratively updating particles' positions.…
The No Unmeasured Confounding Assumption is widely used to identify causal effects in observational studies. Recent work on proximal inference has provided alternative identification results that succeed even in the presence of unobserved…
Stochastic Natural Gradient Variational Inference (NGVI) is a widely used method for approximating posterior distribution in probabilistic models. Despite its empirical success and foundational role in variational inference, its theoretical…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
Since its inception, the neural estimation of mutual information (MI) has demonstrated the empirical success of modeling expected dependency between high-dimensional random variables. However, MI is an aggregate statistic and cannot be used…
Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to…
Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating…