Related papers: Filtering Variational Objectives
Recent work in unsupervised representation learning has focused on learning deep directed latent-variable models. Fitting these models by maximizing the marginal likelihood or evidence is typically intractable, thus a common approximation…
The Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) is a quantity that plays a key role in variational inference. It can also be used as a criterion in model selection. However, though extremely popular in practice in the variational Bayes community, there has…
We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results…
We present a latent variable model for classification that provides a novel probabilistic interpretation of neural network softmax classifiers. We derive a variational objective to train the model, analogous to the evidence lower bound…
We introduce the thermodynamic variational objective (TVO) for learning in both continuous and discrete deep generative models. The TVO arises from a key connection between variational inference and thermodynamic integration that results in…
Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational distribution.…
We introduce a variational reasoning framework for language models that treats thinking traces as latent variables and optimizes them through variational inference. Starting from the evidence lower bound (ELBO), we extend it to a…
To achieve the highest perceptual quality, state-of-the-art diffusion models are optimized with objectives that typically look very different from the maximum likelihood and the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) objectives. In this work, we…
The recently proposed Thermodynamic Variational Objective (TVO) leverages thermodynamic integration to provide a family of variational inference objectives, which both tighten and generalize the ubiquitous Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO).…
In this paper, we propose CI-VI an efficient and scalable solver for semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI). Our method, first, maps SIVI's evidence lower bound (ELBO) to a form involving a nonlinear functional nesting of expected…
A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…
This article studies the Fisher-Rao gradient, also referred to as the natural gradient, of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) which plays a central role in generative machine learning. It reveals that the gap between the evidence and its lower…
Amortised inference enables scalable learning of sequential latent-variable models (LVMs) with the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this setting, variational posteriors are often only partially conditioned. While the true posteriors depend,…
In variational inference (VI), the marginal log-likelihood is estimated using the standard evidence lower bound (ELBO), or improved versions as the importance weighted ELBO (IWELBO). We propose the multiple importance sampling ELBO…
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…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…
The evidence lower bound (ELBO) is one of the most central objectives for probabilistic unsupervised learning. For the ELBOs of several generative models and model classes, we here prove convergence to entropy sums. As one result, we…
Many crucial problems in deep learning and statistical inference are caused by a variational gap, i.e., a difference between model evidence (log-likelihood) and evidence lower bound (ELBO). In particular, in a classical VAE setting that…
We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…
Binary Neural Networks (BiNNs), which employ single-bit precision weights, have emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory usage and power consumption while maintaining competitive performance in large-scale systems. However, training…