Related papers: Perturbative Black Box Variational Inference
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…
Probabilistic numerics casts numerical tasks, such the numerical solution of differential equations, as inference problems to be solved. One approach is to model the unknown quantity of interest as a random variable, and to constrain this…
When used as a surrogate objective for maximum likelihood estimation in latent variable models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) produces state-of-the-art results. Inspired by this, we consider the extension of the ELBO to a family of lower…
As a technique that can compactly represent complex patterns, machine learning has significant potential for predictive inference. K-fold cross-validation (CV) is the most common approach to ascertaining the likelihood that a machine…
We describe a limitation in the expressiveness of the predictive uncertainty estimate given by mean-field variational inference (MFVI), a popular approximate inference method for Bayesian neural networks. In particular, MFVI fails to give…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…
Latent force models are systems whereby there is a mechanistic model describing the dynamics of the system state, with some unknown forcing term that is approximated with a Gaussian process. If such dynamics are non-linear, it can be…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
Many real-life problems are represented as a black-box, i.e., the internal workings are inaccessible or a closed-form mathematical expression of the likelihood function cannot be defined. For continuous random variables likelihood-free…
We study the constraints on alternative theories of gravity that can be determined by multi-band observations of gravitational wave signals emitted from binary black hole coalescences. We focus on three types of General Relativity…
Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…
We derive a new variational formula for the R\'enyi family of divergences, $R_\alpha(Q\|P)$, between probability measures $Q$ and $P$. Our result generalizes the classical Donsker-Varadhan variational formula for the Kullback-Leibler…
Bayesian model averaging, obtained as the expectation of a likelihood function by a posterior distribution, has been widely used for prediction, evaluation of uncertainty, and model selection. Various approaches have been developed to…
We give an overview of statistical models and likelihood, together with two of its variants: penalized and hierarchical likelihood. The Kullback-Leibler divergence is referred to repeatedly, for defining the misspecification risk of a…
Dilation is a puzzling phenomenon within Imprecise Probability theory: when it obtains, our uncertainty evaluation on event $A$ is vaguer after conditioning $A$ on $B$, whatever is event $B$ in a given partition $\mathcal{B}$. In this paper…
In statistical classification/multiple hypothesis testing and machine learning, a model distribution estimated from the training data is usually applied to replace the unknown true distribution in the Bayes decision rule, which introduces a…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Bayesian posterior inference. Though popular, VB comes with few theoretical guarantees, most of which focus on well-specified models. However, models…
Interpreting black-box machine learning models is challenging due to their strong dependence on data and inherently non-parametric nature. This paper reintroduces the concept of importance through "Marginal Variable Importance Metric"…
In this paper, we derive variational inference upper-bounds on the log-partition function of pairwise Markov random fields on the Boolean hypercube, based on quantum relaxations of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We then propose an…