Related papers: Perturbative Black Box Variational Inference

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…

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

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…

Black-box alpha (BB-$\alpha$) is a new approximate inference method based on the minimization of $\alpha$-divergences. BB-$\alpha$ scales to large datasets because it can be implemented using stochastic gradient descent. BB-$\alpha$ can be…

We prove that black-box variational inference (BBVI) with control variates, particularly the sticking-the-landing (STL) estimator, converges at a geometric (traditionally called "linear") rate under perfect variational family specification.…

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.…

Understanding the gradient variance of black-box variational inference (BBVI) is a crucial step for establishing its convergence and developing algorithmic improvements. However, existing studies have yet to show that the gradient variance…

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

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…

Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…

This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI) offers fast and easy-to-use posterior approximation in multiple modern probabilistic programming languages. However, its stochastic optimizer lacks clear convergence criteria and…

Black-box variational inference is widely used in situations where there is no proof that its stochastic optimization succeeds. We suggest this is due to a theoretical gap in existing stochastic optimization proofs: namely the challenge of…