Related papers: Proximity Variational Inference
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…
Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…
Logistic regression involving high-dimensional covariates is a practically important problem. Often the goal is variable selection, i.e., determining which few of the many covariates are associated with the binary response. Unfortunately,…
Embedding is a useful technique to project a high-dimensional feature into a low-dimensional space, and it has many successful applications including link prediction, node classification and natural language processing. Current approaches…
This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth…
We present variational inference with sequential sample-average approximation (VISA), a method for approximate inference in computationally intensive models, such as those based on numerical simulations. VISA extends importance-weighted…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…
Variational Bayes (VB) has shown itself to be a powerful approximation method in many application areas. This paper describes some diagnostics methods which can assess how well the VB approximates the true posterior, particularly with…
Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…
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…
A new gradient-based particle sampling method, MPM-ParVI, based on material point method (MPM), is proposed for variational inference. MPM-ParVI simulates the deformation of a deformable body (e.g. a solid or fluid) under external effects…
Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…
Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference. However, it mainly focuses on the evidence lower bound as variational objective and the development of other measures for variational inference is a promising area of…
The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and the…
Prediction-powered inference (PPI) is a method that improves statistical estimates based on limited human-labeled data. Specifically, PPI methods provide tighter confidence intervals by combining small amounts of human-labeled data with…
Traditional neural networks are simple to train but they typically produce overconfident predictions. In contrast, Bayesian neural networks provide good uncertainty quantification but optimizing them is time consuming due to the large…
Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods approximate the target distribution by iteratively evolving finite weighted particle systems. Recent advances of ParVI methods reveal the benefits of accelerated position update…
Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…
Given an intractable target density $p$, variational inference (VI) attempts to find the best approximation $q$ from a tractable family $Q$. This is typically done by minimizing the exclusive Kullback-Leibler divergence, $\text{KL}(q||p)$.…