Related papers: Perturbative Black Box Variational Inference
Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…
Black Box Variational Inference is a promising framework in a succession of recent efforts to make Variational Inference more ``black box". However, in basic version it either fails to converge due to instability or requires some…
The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…
Binwise Variance Scaling (BVS) has recently been proposed as a post hoc recalibration method for prediction uncertainties of machine learning regression problems that is able of more efficient corrections than uniform variance (or…
A theoretical framework for non-negative matrix factorization based on generalized dual Kullback-Leibler divergence, which includes members of the exponential family of models, is proposed. A family of algorithms is developed using this…
Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…
We study the fundamental and timely problem of learning long sequences in autoregressive modeling and next-token prediction under model misspecification, measured by the joint Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. Our goal is to characterize…
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…
The families of $f$-divergences (e.g. the Kullback-Leibler divergence) and Integral Probability Metrics (e.g. total variation distance or maximum mean discrepancies) are widely used to quantify the similarity between probability…
Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational…
Bernstein-von Mises results (BvM) establish that the Laplace approximation is asymptotically correct in the large-data limit. However, these results are inappropriate for computational purposes since they only hold over most, and not all,…
This paper presents an improved exponential tail bound for Beta distributions, refining a result in [15]. This improvement is achieved by interpreting their bound as a regular Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence one, while introducing a…
In many applications in biology, engineering and economics, identifying similarities and differences between distributions of data from complex processes requires comparing finite categorical samples of discrete counts. Statistical…
Inference is crucial in modern astronomical research, where hidden astrophysical features and patterns are often estimated from indirect and noisy measurements. Inferring the posterior of hidden features, conditioned on the observed…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
Gradient-based optimization is the foundation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Even when the mechanism being optimized is unknown or not differentiable, optimization using high-variance or biased gradient estimates is still…
Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental measure of the dissimilarity between two probability distributions, but it can become unstable in high-dimensional settings due to its sensitivity to mismatches in distributional support.…
While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…
We propose a black-box variational inference method to approximate intractable distributions with an increasingly rich approximating class. Our method, termed variational boosting, iteratively refines an existing variational approximation…
Bayesian inference allows expressing the uncertainty of posterior belief under a probabilistic model given prior information and the likelihood of the evidence. Predominantly, the likelihood function is only implicitly established by a…