Related papers: Filtering Variational Objectives
Diffusion language models (dLLMs) are an emerging alternative to autoregressive (AR) generators, but aligning them to human preferences is challenging because sequence log-likelihoods are intractable and pairwise preference data are costly…
We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…
Barren-plateau results have established exponential gradient suppression as a widely cited obstacle to the scalability of variational quantum algorithms. When and whether these results extend to a given objective has been addressed through…
Multiple data types naturally co-occur when describing real-world phenomena and learning from them is a long-standing goal in machine learning research. However, existing self-supervised generative models approximating an ELBO are not able…
We develop an automated variational inference method for Bayesian structured prediction problems with Gaussian process (GP) priors and linear-chain likelihoods. Our approach does not need to know the details of the structured likelihood…
Bilevel optimization is characterized by a two-level optimization structure, where the upper-level problem is constrained by optimal lower-level solutions, and such structures are prevalent in real-world problems. The constraint by optimal…
Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator…
Recent research has made significant progress on the problem of bounding log partition functions for exponential family graphical models. Such bounds have associated dual parameters that are often used as heuristic estimates of the marginal…
This paper is concerned with sequential filtering based stochastic optimization (FSO) approaches that leverage a probabilistic perspective to implement the incremental proximity method (IPM). The present FSO methods are derived based on the…
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…
We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…
Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational free energy (F) in neuroscience (ELBO = -F). While this…
Several variational bounds involving importance weighting ideas generalize the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) for marginal likelihood optimization, such as the Importance-weighted Auto-Encoder (IWAE), Variational R\'enyi (VR) and VR-IWAE…
In this note we consider setups in which variational objectives for Bayesian neural networks can be computed in closed form. In particular we focus on single-layer networks in which the activation function is piecewise polynomial (e.g.…
This paper is concerned with a recently developed paradigm for population-based optimization, termed particle filter optimization (PFO). This paradigm is attractive in terms of coherence in theory and easiness in mathematical analysis and…
We introduce a new online algorithm for expected log-likelihood maximization in situations where the objective function is multi-modal and/or has saddle points, that we term G-PFSO. The key element underpinning G-PFSO is a probability…
Variational inference for state space models (SSMs) is known to be hard in general. Recent works focus on deriving variational objectives for SSMs from unbiased sequential Monte Carlo estimators. We reveal that the marginal particle filter…
We present Quantized Variational Inference, a new algorithm for Evidence Lower Bound maximization. We show how Optimal Voronoi Tesselation produces variance free gradients for ELBO optimization at the cost of introducing asymptotically…
We propose to scale RL to unverifiable data with a novel algorithm JEPO (Jensen's Evidence lower bound Policy Optimization). While most prior efforts on scaling RL for LLMs focus on verifiable data where ground truth answers are typically…
We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in supervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the…