Related papers: Filtering Variational Objectives
Here, we show that the InfoNCE objective is equivalent to the ELBO in a new class of probabilistic generative model, the recognition parameterised model (RPM). When we learn the optimal prior, the RPM ELBO becomes equal to the mutual…
While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…
Complex computer simulators are increasingly used across fields of science as generative models tying parameters of an underlying theory to experimental observations. Inference in this setup is often difficult, as simulators rarely admit a…
Standard variational lower bounds used to train latent variable models produce biased estimates of most quantities of interest. We introduce an unbiased estimator of the log marginal likelihood and its gradients for latent variable models…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in improving autoregressive models, especially in domains requiring correctness like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, directly…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact…
Particle filtering methods can be applied to estimation problems in discrete spaces on bounded domains, to sample from and marginalise over unknown hidden states. As in continuous settings, problems such as particle degradation can arise:…
Factorized information criterion (FIC) is a recently developed approximation technique for the marginal log-likelihood, which provides an automatic model selection framework for a few latent variable models (LVMs) with tractable inference…
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,…
Recent advances in incorporating neural networks into particle filters provide the desired flexibility to apply particle filters in large-scale real-world applications. The dynamic and measurement models in this framework are learnable…
Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…
We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…
In variational inference (VI), an approximation of the posterior distribution is selected from a family of distributions through numerical optimization. With the most common variational objective function, known as the evidence lower bound…
We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…
Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is a useful tool for efficiently learning probabilistic models in machine learning. Generally approximate posteriors learned by ADVI are forced to be unimodal in order to facilitate use…
Mixture variational distributions in black box variational inference (BBVI) have demonstrated impressive results in challenging density estimation tasks. However, currently scaling the number of mixture components can lead to a linear…
Variational Inference (VI) provides a scalable framework for Bayesian inference by optimizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), but convergence analysis remains challenging due to the objective's non-convexity and non-smoothness in Euclidean…
This research considers a scalable inference for spatial data modeled through Gaussian intrinsic conditional autoregressive (ICAR) structures. The classical estimation method, restricted maximum likelihood (REML), requires repeated…
We present a variational inference (VI) framework that unifies and leverages sequential Monte-Carlo (particle filtering) with \emph{approximate} rejection sampling to construct a flexible family of variational distributions. Furthermore, we…