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Related papers: Advances in Variational Inference

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Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Tom Huix , Anna Korba , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines

Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Joseph Marino , Yisong Yue , Stephan Mandt

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Luca Ghafourpour , Sinho Chewi , Alessio Figalli , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Lucas Kock , Scott A. Sisson , G. S. Rodrigues , David J. Nott

Modern methods for Bayesian regression beyond the Gaussian response setting are often computationally impractical or inaccurate in high dimensions. In fact, as discussed in recent literature, bypassing such a trade-off is still an open…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-14 Augusto Fasano , Daniele Durante , Giacomo Zanella

We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-20 Manuel Glöckler , Michael Deistler , Jakob H. Macke

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

Traditional neural networks are simple to train but they typically produce overconfident predictions. In contrast, Bayesian neural networks provide good uncertainty quantification but optimizing them is time consuming due to the large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…

Explaining how overparametrized neural networks simultaneously achieve low risk and zero empirical risk on benchmark datasets is an open problem. PAC-Bayes bounds optimized using variational inference (VI) have been recently proposed as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Konstantinos Pitas

In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Charles C. Margossian , David M. Blei

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

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-15 Alp Kucukelbir , Rajesh Ranganath , Andrew Gelman , David M. Blei

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-15 Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Shakir Mohamed

Sampling and Variational Inference (VI) are two large families of methods for approximate inference that have complementary strengths. Sampling methods excel at approximating arbitrary probability distributions, but can be inefficient. VI…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-07 Richard D. Lange , Ari Benjamin , Ralf M. Haefner , Xaq Pitkow

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

Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-26 Oliver Dürr , Stephan Hörling , Daniel Dold , Ivonne Kovylov , Beate Sick

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Dang H. Nguyen , Duy Nguyen

Variational inference enables approximate posterior inference of the highly over-parameterized neural networks that are popular in modern machine learning. Unfortunately, such posteriors are known to exhibit various pathological behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Beau Coker , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez

Bayesian approach, as a useful tool for quantifying uncertainties, has been widely used for solving inverse problems of partial differential equations (PDEs). One of the key difficulties for employing Bayesian approach for the issue is how…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Qian Zhao , Zongben Xu , Deyu Meng , Yee Leung