Related papers: Alpha-Beta Divergence For Variational Inference
Recent advances in deep learning have brought to the fore models that can make multiple computational steps in the service of completing a task; these are capable of describ- ing long-term dependencies in sequential data. Novel recurrent…
We introduce a class of generic spike-and-slab priors for high-dimensional linear regression with grouped variables and present a Coordinate-ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for obtaining an optimal variational Bayes…
The variational framework for learning inducing variables (Titsias, 2009a) has had a large impact on the Gaussian process literature. The framework may be interpreted as minimizing a rigorously defined Kullback-Leibler divergence between…
Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…
We consider a variant of online convex optimization in which both the instances (input vectors) and the comparator (weight vector) are unconstrained. We exploit a natural scale invariance symmetry in our unconstrained setting: the…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…
Sequential Bayesian inference over predictive functions is a natural framework for continual learning from streams of data. However, applying it to neural networks has proved challenging in practice. Addressing the drawbacks of existing…
Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…
We propose a scalable variational Bayes method for statistical inference for a single or low-dimensional subset of the coordinates of a high-dimensional parameter in sparse linear regression. Our approach relies on assigning a mean-field…
We investigate the problem of minimizing Kullback-Leibler divergence between a linear model $Ax$ and a positive vector $b$ in different convex domains (positive orthant, $n$-dimensional box, probability simplex). Our focus is on the SMART…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…
Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) offers a principled and flexible framework for conducting Bayesian inference in any situation where forward simulations are feasible. However, validating the accuracy and reliability of the inferred…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…
Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…
Empirical Bayes small area estimation based on the well-known Fay-Herriot model may produce unreliable estimates when outlying areas exist. Existing robust methods against outliers or model misspecification are generally inefficient when…
Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…
We propose using model reparametrization to improve variational Bayes inference for hierarchical models whose variables can be classified as global (shared across observations) or local (observation specific). Posterior dependence between…
Applications of high-dimensional regression often involve multiple sources or types of covariates. We propose methodology for this setting, emphasizing the "wide data" regime with large total dimensionality p and sample size n<<p. We focus…
Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…