Related papers: Variational Rejection Sampling
Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…
We consider a Bayesian approach to variable selection in the presence of high dimensional covariates based on a hierarchical model that places prior distributions on the regression coefficients as well as on the model space. We adopt the…
We consider stochastic gradient descent and its averaging variant for binary classification problems in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. In the traditional analysis using a consistency property of loss functions, it is known that the…
In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…
Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba-…
We consider the problem of sampling from a posterior distribution arising in Bayesian inverse problems in science, engineering, and imaging. Our method belongs to the family of independence Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) sampling algorithms,…
Uncertainty estimation in large deep-learning models is a computationally challenging task, where it is difficult to form even a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution. In such situations, existing methods usually resort to a…
Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…
Recent work has argued that stochastic gradient descent can approximate the Bayesian uncertainty in model parameters near local minima. In this work we develop a similar correspondence for minibatch natural gradient descent (NGD). We prove…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
Contrastive Divergence (CD) and Persistent Contrastive Divergence (PCD) are popular methods for training the weights of Restricted Boltzmann Machines. However, both methods use an approximate method for sampling from the model distribution.…
We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a…
Estimation of finite mixture models when the mixing distribution support is unknown is an important problem. This paper gives a new approach based on a marginal likelihood for the unknown support. Motivated by a Bayesian Dirichlet prior…
In real-world Bayesian inference applications, prior assumptions regarding the parameters of interest may be unrepresentative of their actual values for a given dataset. In particular, if the likelihood is concentrated far out in the wings…
Inference for high-dimensional logistic regression models using penalized methods has been a challenging research problem. As an illustration, a major difficulty is the significant bias of the Lasso estimator, which limits its direct…
We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output…
Stochastic approximation is one of the effective approach to deal with the large-scale machine learning problems and the recent research has focused on reduction of variance, caused by the noisy approximations of the gradients. In this…