Related papers: Alpha-Beta Divergence For Variational Inference
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
Current approaches in approximate inference for Bayesian neural networks minimise the Kullback-Leibler divergence to approximate the true posterior over the weights. However, this approximation is without knowledge of the final application,…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a novel family of iterative algorithms which carry out $\alpha$-divergence minimisation in a Variational Inference context. They do so by ensuring a systematic decrease at each step in the $\alpha$-divergence…
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…
Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…
Neural networks are popular state-of-the-art models for many different tasks.They are often trained via back-propagation to find a value of the weights that correctly predicts the observed data. Although back-propagation has shown good…
The ability to compute the exact divergence between two high-dimensional distributions is useful in many applications but doing so naively is intractable. Computing the alpha-beta divergence -- a family of divergences that includes the…
We present new methods for batch anomaly detection in multivariate time series. Our methods are based on maximizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the data distribution within and outside an interval of the time series. An…
Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…
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…
A framework is presented for fitting inverse problem models via variational Bayes approximations. This methodology guarantees flexibility to statistical model specification for a broad range of applications, good accuracy and reduced model…
This paper focuses on $\alpha$-divergence minimisation methods for Variational Inference. More precisely, we are interested in algorithms optimising the mixture weights of any given mixture model, without any information on the underlying…
We derive a new variational formula for the R\'enyi family of divergences, $R_\alpha(Q\|P)$, between probability measures $Q$ and $P$. Our result generalizes the classical Donsker-Varadhan variational formula for the Kullback-Leibler…
In discriminative settings such as regression and classification there are two random variables at play, the inputs X and the targets Y. Here, we demonstrate that the Variational Information Bottleneck can be viewed as a compromise between…
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…
In statistical classification/multiple hypothesis testing and machine learning, a model distribution estimated from the training data is usually applied to replace the unknown true distribution in the Bayes decision rule, which introduces a…