Related papers: Filtering Variational Objectives

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…

We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…

Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) lies in the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation…

The variational lower bound (a.k.a. ELBO or free energy) is the central objective for many established as well as for many novel algorithms for unsupervised learning. Such algorithms usually increase the bound until parameters have…

When training large models on limited data, avoiding overfitting is paramount. Common grid search or smarter search methods rely on expensive separate runs for each candidate hyperparameter, while carving out a validation set that reduces…

The marginal likelihood, also known as the evidence, is regarded as a mathematical embodiment of Occam's razor, enabling model selection that avoids overfitting. The evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective from variational inference has also…

This work introduces a new method for selecting the number of components in finite mixture models (FMMs) using variational Bayes, inspired by the large-sample properties of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) derived from mean-field (MF)…

Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, order-agnostic generation with iterative refinement, offering a flexible alternative to autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, adapting reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning…

This article considers Bayesian model selection via mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Towards this goal, we study the non-asymptotic properties of MF inference under the Bayesian framework that allows latent variables and model…

Recent methods for knowledge grounded dialogs generate responses by incorporating information from an external textual document. These methods do not require the exact document to be known during training and rely on the use of a retrieval…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) greatly enriches the expressiveness of variational families by considering implicit variational distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. However, due to the intractable densities of…

Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…

A body of recent work has focused on constructing a variational family of filtered distributions using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). Inspired by this work, we introduce Particle Smoothing Variational Objectives (SVO), a novel backward…

While Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs), such as LLaDA, present a promising paradigm for language modeling, there has been relatively little effort in aligning these models with human preferences via reinforcement learning. The challenge…

Decomposition of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective of VAE used for density estimation revealed the deficiency of VAE for representation learning and suggested ways to improve the model. In this paper, we investigate whether we can…

A number of popular transfer learning methods rely on grid search to select regularization hyperparameters that control over-fitting. This grid search requirement has several key disadvantages: the search is computationally expensive,…

Auto-encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB) is a powerful and general algorithm for fitting latent variable models (a promising direction for unsupervised learning), and is well-known for training the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). In this…

Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational…

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…