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Binary Neural Networks (BiNNs), which employ single-bit precision weights, have emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory usage and power consumption while maintaining competitive performance in large-scale systems. However, training…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-18 Luca Nepote , Alix Lhéritier , Nicolas Bondoux , Marios Kountouris , Maurizio Filippone

Several scalable sample-based methods to compute the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions have been proposed and applied in large-scale machine learning models. While they have been found to be unstable, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Sandesh Ghimire , Prashnna K Gyawali , Linwei Wang

The $\alpha$-divergences include the well-known Kullback-Leibler divergence, Hellinger distance and $\chi^2$-divergence. In this paper, we derive differential and integral relations between the $\alpha$-divergences that are generalizations…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Tomohiro Nishiyama

We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Dirk van der Hoeven , Julia Olkhovskaia , Tim van Erven

A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…

Computation · Statistics 2013-10-15 Alexis Roche

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Shitao Fan , Ilsang Ohn , David Dunson , Lizhen Lin

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Kaiwen Wu , Jacob R. Gardner

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Heiko Zimmermann , Hao Wu , Babak Esmaeili , Jan-Willem van de Meent

Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Minyoung Kim

Intractable distributions present a common difficulty in inference within the probabilistic knowledge representation framework and variational methods have recently been popular in providing an approximate solution. In this article, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-05-30 D. Barber , P. de van Laar

This paper presents a new derivation of the variational Poisson multi-Bernoulli (V-PMB) filter for multi-target estimation proposed in [#Williams15]. The proposed derivation is based on considering an augmented space that includes the set…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-11 Ángel F. García-Fernández , Yuxuan Xia

A loss function measures the discrepancy between the true values and their estimated fits, for a given instance of data. In classification problems, a loss function is said to be proper if a minimizer of the expected loss is the true…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Amichai Painsky , Gregory W. Wornell

Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been…

This paper studies the Variational Inference (VI) used for training Bayesian Neural Networks (BNN) in the overparameterized regime, i.e., when the number of neurons tends to infinity. More specifically, we consider overparameterized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-11 Tom Huix , Szymon Majewski , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Anna Korba

We characterize Martin-L\"of randomness and Schnorr randomness in terms of the merging of opinions, along the lines of the Blackwell-Dubins Theorem. After setting up a general framework for defining notions of merging randomness, we focus…

Logic · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Simon M. Huttegger , Sean Walsh , Francesca Zaffora Blando

Black hole perturbation theory beyond second order is not well understood because typically one defines the meaning of gauge invariance order by order which is ambiguous. In this series of works we therefore developed a new approach which…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-02-10 Jonas Neuser , Thomas Thiemann

Parameter inference for stochastic differential equations is challenging due to the presence of a latent diffusion process. Working with an Euler-Maruyama discretisation for the diffusion, we use variational inference to jointly learn the…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-15 Thomas Ryder , Andrew Golightly , A. Stephen McGough , Dennis Prangle

This work studies the variation in Kullback-Leibler divergence between random draws from some popular nonparametric processes and their baseline measure. In particular we focus on the Dirichlet process, the P\'olya tree and the frequentist…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-25 James Watson , Luis Nieto-Barajas , Chris Holmes

We propose a lightweight and single-pass uncertainty quantification method for detecting hallucinations in Large Language Models. The method uses attention matrices to estimate uncertainty without requiring repeated sampling or external…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Gijs van Dijk

Generative models have achieved remarkable success across a range of applications, yet their evaluation still lacks principled uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we develop a method for comparing how close different generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-24 Zijun Gao , Yan Sun , Han Su