Related papers: Variational Inference for Policy Gradient
Variational methods are widely used for approximate posterior inference. However, their use is typically limited to families of distributions that enjoy particular conjugacy properties. To circumvent this limitation, we propose a family of…
We consider the probabilistic analogue to neural network matrix factorization (Dziugaite & Roy, 2015), which we construct with Bayesian neural networks and fit with variational inference. We find that a linear model fit with variational…
Stochastic variational inference algorithms are derived for fitting various heteroskedastic time series models. We examine Gaussian, t, and skew-t response GARCH models and fit these using Gaussian variational approximating densities. We…
We combine reinforcement learning with variational autoregressive networks (VANs) to perform data-free training and sampling for the discrete Ising model and the continuous $\phi^4$ scalar field theory. We quantify the complexity of the…
Recent efforts on combining deep models with probabilistic graphical models are promising in providing flexible models that are also easy to interpret. We propose a variational message-passing algorithm for variational inference in such…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the…
We argue that inventory management presents unique opportunities for the reliable application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To enable this, we emphasize and test two complementary techniques. The first is Hindsight Differentiable…
Diffusion models are a class of flexible generative models trained with an approximation to the log-likelihood objective. However, most use cases of diffusion models are not concerned with likelihoods, but instead with downstream objectives…
We introduce a simulation-based, amortised Bayesian inference scheme to infer the parameters of random walks. Our approach learns the posterior distribution of the walks' parameters with a likelihood-free method. In the first step a graph…
Bayesian inference for inverse problems involves computing expectations under posterior distributions -- e.g., posterior means, variances, or predictive quantities -- typically via Monte Carlo (MC) estimation. When the quantity of interest…
In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…
Policy gradient methods are a widely used class of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms where a state-dependent baseline is used to reduce gradient estimator variance. Several recent papers extend the baseline to depend on both the…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large reasoning models (LRMs) using policy-gradient methods such as GRPO. To stabilize training, these methods typically center…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
Network pruning is a promising way to generate light but accurate models and enable their deployment on resource-limited edge devices. However, the current state-of-the-art assumes that the effective sub-network and the other superfluous…
Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…
Aligning denoising generative models with human preferences or verifiable rewards remains a key challenge. While policy-gradient online reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled post-training framework, its direct application is…
Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…