Related papers: Variational Rejection Sampling
A number of distributions that arise in statistical applications can be expressed in the form of a weighted density: the product of a base density and a nonnegative weight function. Generating variates from such a distribution may be…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully…
We introduce Ensemble Rejection Sampling, a scheme for exact simulation from the posterior distribution of the latent states of a class of non-linear non-Gaussian state-space models. Ensemble Rejection Sampling relies on a proposal for the…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…
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…
Inference for models with recursively defined likelihoods is computationally demanding, limiting scalability to large datasets. We propose a stabilised weighted subsampling methodology for accelerated inference based on an unbiased…
Traditional approaches to variational inference rely on parametric families of variational distributions, with the choice of family playing a critical role in determining the accuracy of the resulting posterior approximation. Simple…
The statistics and machine learning communities have recently seen a growing interest in classification-based approaches to two-sample testing. The outcome of a classification-based two-sample test remains a rejection decision, which is not…
Maximizing the log-likelihood is a crucial aspect of learning latent variable models, and variational inference (VI) stands as the commonly adopted method. However, VI can encounter challenges in achieving a high log-likelihood when dealing…
We propose a new Stein self-repulsive dynamics for obtaining diversified samples from intractable un-normalized distributions. Our idea is to introduce Stein variational gradient as a repulsive force to push the samples of Langevin dynamics…
We propose a coupled rejection-sampling method for sampling from couplings of arbitrary distributions. The method relies on accepting or rejecting coupled samples coming from dominating marginals. Contrary to existing acceptance-rejection…
Deep neural networks(NNs) have achieved impressive performance, often exceed human performance on many computer vision tasks. However, one of the most challenging issues that still remains is that NNs are overconfident in their predictions,…
We present a variational method for online state estimation and parameter learning in state-space models (SSMs), a ubiquitous class of latent variable models for sequential data. As per standard batch variational techniques, we use…
This paper proposes a new Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to perform online estimation in the context of state space models when either the transition density of the latent state or the conditional likelihood of an observation given a…
Models with a large number of latent variables are often used to fully utilize the information in big or complex data. However, they can be difficult to estimate using standard approaches, and variational inference methods are a popular…
Posterior inference with an intractable likelihood is becoming an increasingly common task in scientific domains which rely on sophisticated computer simulations. Typically, these forward models do not admit tractable densities forcing…
We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…