Related papers: Perturbative Black Box Variational Inference
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…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…
We propose a robust and scalable variational Bayes (VB) framework designed to effectively handle contamination and outliers in dataset. Our approach partitions the data into $m$ disjoint subsets and formulates a joint optimization problem…
Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…
Estimating the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between language models has many applications, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), interpretability, and knowledge distillation. However, computing the exact KL…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…
Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…
We extend several recent results providing symmetry-based guarantees for variational inference (VI) with location-scale families. VI approximates a target density $p$ by the best match $q^*$ in a family $Q$ of tractable distributions that…
Bayesian neural networks (BNN) promise to combine the predictive performance of neural networks with principled uncertainty modeling important for safety-critical systems and decision making. However, posterior uncertainty estimates depend…
Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…
Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
Modern variational inference (VI) uses stochastic gradients to avoid intractable expectations, enabling large-scale probabilistic inference in complex models. VI posits a family of approximating distributions q and then finds the member of…
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of…
Approximate inference in high-dimensional, discrete probabilistic models is a central problem in computational statistics and machine learning. This paper describes discrete particle variational inference (DPVI), a new approach that…
We study the variational inference problem of minimizing a regularized R\'enyi divergence over an exponential family. We propose to solve this problem with a Bregman proximal gradient algorithm. We propose a sampling-based algorithm to…
Estimating Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence from samples of two distributions is essential in many machine learning problems. Variational methods using neural network discriminator have been proposed to achieve this task in a scalable…
This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use…
As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…
Many problems in machine learning are naturally expressed in the language of undirected graphical models. Here, we propose black-box learning and inference algorithms for undirected models that optimize a variational approximation to the…