Related papers: Filtering Variational Objectives
Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to diffusion and flow models for visual tasks such as text-to-image generation. However, these tasks remain challenging because diffusion models have intractable likelihoods, which creates a…
Multimodal variational autoencoders have demonstrated their ability to learn the relationships between different modalities by mapping them into a latent representation. Their design and capacity to perform any-to-any conditional and…
Recent advances in deep learning have enabled optimization of deep reactive policies (DRPs) for continuous MDP planning by encoding a parametric policy as a deep neural network and exploiting automatic differentiation in an end-to-end…
To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the…
Diffusion probabilistic models have achieved mainstream success in many generative modeling tasks, from image generation to inverse problem solving. A distinct feature of these models is that they correspond to deep hierarchical latent…
We present Future-KL Influenced Policy Optimization (FIPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to overcome reasoning bottlenecks in large language models. While GRPO style training scales effectively, it typically relies on…
In this paper, we study the lower complexity bounds for finite-sum optimization problems, where the objective is the average of $n$ individual component functions. We consider Proximal Incremental First-order (PIFO) algorithms which have…
Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated a capacity for perceptually impressive synthesis, but can they also be great likelihood-based models? We answer this in the affirmative, and introduce a family of diffusion-based…
Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…
Probabilistic models are often trained by maximum likelihood, which corresponds to minimizing a specific f-divergence between the model and data distribution. In light of recent successes in training Generative Adversarial Networks,…
Standard probabilistic sparse coding assumes a Laplace prior, a linear mapping from latents to observables, and Gaussian observable distributions. We here derive a solely entropy-based learning objective for the parameters of standard…
Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…
In this paper, we develop the notion of evidence lower bound difference (ELBD), based on which an efficient score algorithm is presented to implement feature selection on latent variables of VAE and its variants. Further, we propose weak…
Optimizing black-box functions is a fundamental problem in science and engineering. To solve this problem, many approaches learn a surrogate function that estimates the underlying objective from limited historical evaluations. Large…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has shown notable effectiveness in enhancing large language models (LLMs) reasoning performance, especially in mathematics tasks. However, such improvements often come with reduced outcome…
Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…
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…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…
Matrix factorization (MF) has been widely applied to collaborative filtering in recommendation systems. Its Bayesian variants can derive posterior distributions of user and item embeddings, and are more robust to sparse ratings. However,…