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Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Francesco Locatello , Gideon Dresdner , Rajiv Khanna , Isabel Valera , Gunnar Rätsch

The {\lambda}-exponential family has recently been proposed to generalize the exponential family. While the exponential family is well-understood and widely used, this it not the case of the {\lambda}-exponential family. However, many…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-06-21 Thomas Guilmeau , Emilie Chouzenoux , Víctor Elvira

Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-10 Ted Westling , Tyler H. McCormick

We present a general method for deriving collapsed variational inference algo- rithms for probabilistic models in the conjugate exponential family. Our method unifies many existing approaches to collapsed variational inference. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-05 James Hensman , Magnus Rattray , Neil D. Lawrence

The high cost and data scarcity in scientific exploration have motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven components in Bayesian optimization (BO). However, existing approaches typically embed LLMs directly into…

Model fusion combines multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) with different strengths into a more powerful, integrated model through lightweight training methods. Existing works on model fusion focus primarily on supervised fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yanggan Gu , Yuanyi Wang , Zhaoyi Yan , Yiming Zhang , Qi Zhou , Fei Wu , Hongxia Yang

Latent variable models have become instrumental in computational neuroscience for reasoning about neural computation. This has fostered the development of powerful offline algorithms for extracting latent neural trajectories from neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-22 Matthew Dowling , Yuan Zhao , Il Memming Park

Recent advancements have established Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a pivotal paradigm for aligning generative models with human intent. However, group-based optimization frameworks (e.g., GRPO) face a critical limitation: the rapid decay…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Sujie Hu , Chubin Chen , Jiashu Zhu , Jiahong Wu , Xiangxiang Chu , Xiu Li

We show that dropout training is best understood as performing MAP estimation concurrently for a family of conditional models whose objectives are themselves lower bounded by the original dropout objective. This discovery allows us to pick…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-28 Gábor Melis , Charles Blundell , Tomáš Kočiský , Karl Moritz Hermann , Chris Dyer , Phil Blunsom

We revisit the theory of importance weighted variational inference (IWVI), a promising strategy for learning latent variable models. IWVI uses new variational bounds, known as Monte Carlo objectives (MCOs), obtained by replacing intractable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-27 Pierre-Alexandre Mattei , Jes Frellsen

The VAPO framework has demonstrated significant empirical success in enhancing the efficiency and reliability of reinforcement learning for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning tasks with large language models (LLMs). By systematically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Jintian Shao , Yiming Cheng , Hongyi Huang , Beiwen Zhang , Zhiyu Wu , You Shan , Mingkai Zheng

Implicit probabilistic models are a flexible class of models defined by a simulation process for data. They form the basis for theories which encompass our understanding of the physical world. Despite this fundamental nature, the use of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-07 Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Sebastian W. Ober

Continuous latent time series models are prevalent in Bayesian modeling; examples include the Kalman filter, dynamic collaborative filtering, or dynamic topic models. These models often benefit from structured, non mean field variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-05 Robert Bamler , Stephan Mandt

Despite deep learning's broad success, its abstract-reasoning bottleneck persists. We tackle Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), the benchmark for pattern, reasoning and problem-solving intelligence. We model the full causal chain image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Ruizhuo Song , Beiming Yuan

Stochastic Interpolants (SI) is a powerful framework for generative modeling, capable of flexibly transforming between two probability distributions. However, its use in jointly optimized latent variable models remains unexplored as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Saurabh Singh , Dmitry Lagun

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely used framework for optimizing objective functionals in the presence of both randomness and model-form uncertainty. A key step in the practical solution of many DRO problems is a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-22 Jeremiah Birrell

We propose a simple, tractable lower bound on the mutual information contained in the joint generative density of any latent variable generative model: the GILBO (Generative Information Lower BOund). It offers a data-independent measure of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-11 Alexander A. Alemi , Ian Fischer

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

While likelihood-based generative models, particularly diffusion and autoregressive models, have achieved remarkable fidelity in visual generation, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) objective, which minimizes the forward KL…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Kaiwen Zheng , Yongxin Chen , Huayu Chen , Guande He , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Qinsheng Zhang