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Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-31 Gianluca Detommaso , Tiangang Cui , Alessio Spantini , Youssef Marzouk , Robert Scheichl

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is not a proper distance metric and does not satisfy the triangle inequality, posing theoretical challenges in certain practical applications. Existing work has demonstrated that KL divergence between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Shiji Xiao , Yufeng Zhang , Chubo Liu , Yan Ding , Keqin Li , Kenli Li

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Sandesh Ghimire , Aria Masoomi , Jennifer Dy

Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 David R. Burt , Sebastian W. Ober , Adrià Garriga-Alonso , Mark van der Wilk

Normalizing flows can generate complex target distributions and thus show promise in many applications in Bayesian statistics as an alternative or complement to MCMC for sampling posteriors. Since no data set from the target posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-19 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

We explore a recently proposed Variational Dropout technique that provided an elegant Bayesian interpretation to Gaussian Dropout. We extend Variational Dropout to the case when dropout rates are unbounded, propose a way to reduce the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-14 Dmitry Molchanov , Arsenii Ashukha , Dmitry Vetrov

The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-02 Nikolaos Gianniotis

We study the problem of characterizing the stability of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence under Gaussian perturbations beyond Gaussian families. Existing relaxed triangle inequalities for KL divergence critically rely on the assumption that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Jialu Pan , Yufeng Zhang , Nan Hu , Zhenbang Chen , Ji Wang , Keqin Li

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Chunlin Ji , Haige Shen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-21 Ali Unlu , Laurence Aitchison

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-11 Ali Unlu , Laurence Aitchison

This paper presents a variational Bayesian kernel selection (VBKS) algorithm for sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models. In contrast to existing GP kernel selection algorithms that aim to select only one kernel with the highest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Tong Teng , Jie Chen , Yehong Zhang , Kian Hsiang Low

Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hoang Phuc Hau Luu , Hanlin Yu , Bernardo Williams , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami

Diffusion bridges are a promising class of deep-learning methods for sampling from unnormalized distributions. Recent works show that the Log Variance (LV) loss consistently outperforms the reverse Kullback-Leibler (rKL) loss when using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sebastian Sanokowski , Lukas Gruber , Christoph Bartmann , Sepp Hochreiter , Sebastian Lehner

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful generative model that can estimate the probability of a data point by using latent variables. In the VAE, the posterior of the latent variable given the data point is regularized by the prior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-30 Hiroshi Takahashi , Tomoharu Iwata , Yuki Yamanaka , Masanori Yamada , Satoshi Yagi

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are known to suffer from learning uninformative latent representation of the input due to issues such as approximated posterior collapse, or entanglement of the latent space. We impose an explicit constraint…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Victor Prokhorov , Ehsan Shareghi , Yingzhen Li , Mohammad Taher Pilehvar , Nigel Collier

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Manushi Welandawe , Michael Riis Andersen , Aki Vehtari , Jonathan H. Huggins

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

While deep learning has expanded the possibilities for highly expressive variational families, the practical benefits of these tools for variational inference (VI) are often limited by the minimization of the traditional Kullback-Leibler…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-18 Roman Soletskyi , Marylou Gabrié , Bruno Loureiro