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Related papers: Advances in Variational Inference

200 papers

We conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the mean-field variational inference for approximating posterior distributions in complex Bayesian models that may involve latent variables. We show that the mean-field approximation to the posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Wei Han , Yun Yang

The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Jay Whang , Stefano Ermon

In a variety of scientific applications we wish to characterize a physical system using measurements or observations. This often requires us to solve an inverse problem, which usually has non-unique solutions so uncertainty must be…

Geophysics · Physics 2022-05-19 Xin Zhang , Muhammad Atif Nawaz , Xuebin Zhao , Andrew Curtis

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell

Fast variational approximate algorithms are developed for Bayesian semiparametric regression when the response variable is a count, i.e. a non-negative integer. We treat both the Poisson and Negative Binomial families as models for the…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-09-18 Jan Luts , Matt P. Wand

We present a generative modeling approach based on the variational inference framework for likelihood-free simulation-based inference. The method leverages latent variables within variational autoencoders to efficiently estimate complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mayank Nautiyal , Andrey Shternshis , Andreas Hellander , Prashant Singh

Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-22 Hachem Saddiki , Andrew C. Trapp , Patrick Flaherty

Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Jun Han

We propose a new approach to Bayesian prediction that caters for models with a large number of parameters and is robust to model misspecification. Given a class of high-dimensional (but parametric) predictive models, this new approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-13 David T. Frazier , Ruben Loaiza-Maya , Gael M. Martin , Bonsoo Koo

We study system design problems stated as parameterized stochastic programs with a chance-constraint set. We adopt a Bayesian approach that requires the computation of a posterior predictive integral which is usually intractable. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-07 Prateek Jaiswal , Harsha Honnappa , Vinayak A. Rao

Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-10 Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

The article describe the model, derivation, and implementation of variational Bayesian inference for linear and logistic regression, both with and without automatic relevance determination. It has the dual function of acting as a tutorial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-18 Jan Drugowitsch

Stochastic models with global parameters and latent variables are common, and for which variational inference (VI) is popular. However, existing methods are often either slow or inaccurate in high dimensions. We suggest a fast and accurate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-26 Weiben Zhang , Michael Stanley Smith , Worapree Maneesoonthorn , Ruben Loaiza-Maya

Structural equation models are commonly used to capture the relationship between sets of observed and unobservable variables. Traditionally these models are fitted using frequentist approaches but recently researchers and practitioners have…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-22 Khue-Dung Dang , Luca Maestrini

The motivations for using variational inference (VI) in neural networks differ significantly from those in latent variable models. This has a counter-intuitive consequence; more expressive variational approximations can provide…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-22 Brian Trippe , Richard Turner

Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-03 Alp Kucukelbir , Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , Andrew Gelman , David M. Blei

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

Posterior distributions arising in ill-posed Bayesian inverse problems are often both analytically intractable and highly sensitive to parameters of the chosen prior family. We aim to understand the sensitivity of intractable posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-20 Yucong Liu , Zilai Si , Alexander Strang

Amortized inference allows latent-variable models trained via variational learning to scale to large datasets. The quality of approximate inference is determined by two factors: a) the capacity of the variational distribution to match the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Chris Cremer , Xuechen Li , David Duvenaud

Approximate inference algorithm is one of the fundamental research fields in machine learning. The two dominant theoretical inference frameworks in machine learning are variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Yichuan Zhang