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As modern neural networks get more complex, specifying a model with high predictive performance and sound uncertainty quantification becomes a more challenging task. Despite some promising theoretical results on the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alisa Sheinkman , Sara Wade

This paper considers the problem of learning the parameters in Bayesian networks of discrete variables with known structure and hidden variables. Previous approaches in these settings typically use expectation maximization; when the network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-09-27 Yonatan Halpern , David Sontag

Approximate Bayesian inference for neural networks is considered a robust alternative to standard training, often providing good performance on out-of-distribution data. However, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) with high-fidelity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Pavel Izmailov , Patrick Nicholson , Sanae Lotfi , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Nan Feng , Xun Huan

Second-order optimizers are thought to hold the potential to speed up neural network training, but due to the enormous size of the curvature matrix, they typically require approximations to be computationally tractable. The most successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Frederik Benzing

Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) seeks experiments that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) in model parameters. Directly estimating the EIG using nested Monte Carlo is computationally expensive and requires an explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Jiayuan Dong , Christian Jacobsen , Mehdi Khalloufi , Maryam Akram , Wanjiao Liu , Karthik Duraisamy , Xun Huan

Most neural networks are trained using first-order optimization methods, which are sensitive to the parameterization of the model. Natural gradient descent is invariant to smooth reparameterizations because it is defined in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-31 Kevin Luk , Roger Grosse

We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kian Ming A. Chai , Edwin V. Bonilla

Equation learning aims to infer differential equation models from data. While a number of studies have shown that differential equation models can be successfully identified when the data are sufficiently detailed and corrupted with…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2021-09-30 Simon Martina-Perez , Matthew J. Simpson , Ruth E. Baker

This paper provides lower bounds on the convergence rate of Derivative Free Optimization (DFO) with noisy function evaluations, exposing a fundamental and unavoidable gap between the performance of algorithms with access to gradients and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-09-13 Kevin G. Jamieson , Robert D. Nowak , Benjamin Recht

Bayesian methods promise to fix many shortcomings of deep learning, but they are impractical and rarely match the performance of standard methods, let alone improve them. In this paper, we demonstrate practical training of deep networks…

Natural Gradient Descent, a second-degree optimization method motivated by the information geometry, makes use of the Fisher Information Matrix instead of the Hessian which is typically used. However, in many cases, the Fisher Information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Rajesh Shrestha

Active learning methods for neural networks are usually based on greedy criteria which ultimately give a single new design point for the evaluation. Such an approach requires either some heuristics to sample a batch of design points at one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Evgenii Tsymbalov , Sergei Makarychev , Alexander Shapeev , Maxim Panov

Bayesian Neural Networks with Latent Variables (BNN+LVs) capture predictive uncertainty by explicitly modeling model uncertainty (via priors on network weights) and environmental stochasticity (via a latent input noise variable). In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Yaniv Yacoby , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez

A Bayesian network is a probabilistic graphical model that consists of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), where each node is a random variable and attached to each node is a conditional probability distribution (CPD). A Bayesian network can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Charupriya Sharma , Zhenyu A. Liao , James Cussens , Peter van Beek

Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-09 Elliot Maceda , Emily C. Hector , Amanda Lenzi , Brian J. Reich

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

We study Bayesian inverse problems with mixed noise, modeled as a combination of additive and multiplicative Gaussian components. While traditional inference methods often assume fixed or known noise characteristics, real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Paul Hagemann , Robert Gruhlke , Bernhard Stankewitz , Claudia Schillings , Gabriele Steidl

Scalable algorithms of posterior approximation allow Bayesian nonparametrics such as Dirichlet process mixture to scale up to larger dataset at fractional cost. Recent algorithms, notably the stochastic variational inference performs local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Kart-Leong Lim , Xudong Jiang

Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Xingyi Yang