Related papers: Proximity Variational Inference
Modern neural network architectures have achieved remarkable accuracies but remain highly dependent on their training data, often lacking interpretability in their learned mappings. While effective on large datasets, they tend to overfit on…
In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…
Probabilistic state estimation is essential for robots navigating uncertain environments. Accurately and efficiently managing uncertainty in estimated states is key to robust robotic operation. However, nonlinearities in robotic platforms…
Selecting powerful predictors for an outcome is a cornerstone task for machine learning. However, some types of questions can only be answered by identifying the predictors that causally affect the outcome. A recent approach to this causal…
Likelihood-free methods are an essential tool for performing inference for implicit models which can be simulated from, but for which the corresponding likelihood is intractable. However, common likelihood-free methods do not scale well to…
Variational Inference makes a trade-off between the capacity of the variational family and the tractability of finding an approximate posterior distribution. Instead, Boosting Variational Inference allows practitioners to obtain…
Improving the robustness of neural nets in regression tasks is key to their application in multiple domains. Deep learning-based approaches aim to achieve this goal either by improving their prediction of specific values (i.e., point…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…
Variational inference is an approximation framework for Bayesian inference that seeks to improve quantified uncertainty in predictions by optimizing a simplified distribution over parameters to stand in for the full posterior. Capturing…
Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…
Variational representations of divergences and distances between high-dimensional probability distributions offer significant theoretical insights and practical advantages in numerous research areas. Recently, they have gained popularity in…
This paper describes an approach to simultaneously identify clusters and estimate cluster-specific regression parameters from the given data. Such an approach can be useful in learning the relationship between input and output when the…
Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…
Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…
Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Invariant prediction [Peters et al., 2016] analyzes feature/outcome data from multiple environments to identify invariant features - those with a stable predictive relationship to the outcome. Such features support generalization to new…
Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…