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The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a well-studied, deep, latent-variable model (DLVM) that efficiently optimizes the variational lower bound of the log marginal data likelihood and has a strong theoretical foundation. However, the VAE's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Surojit Saha , Sarang Joshi , Ross Whitaker

Mean-field variational inference is one of the most popular approaches to inference in discrete random fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. Thus, in practice,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-12-04 Pierre Baqué , Timur Bagautdinov , François Fleuret , Pascal Fua

We present a likelihood-free probabilistic inversion method based on normalizing flows for high-dimensional inverse problems. The proposed method is composed of two complementary networks: a summary network for data compression and an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Jice Zeng , Yuanzhe Wang , Alexandre M. Tartakovsky , David Barajas-Solano

Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Sharmila Karumuri , Ilias Bilionis

We present a continuation method that entails generating a sequence of transition probability density functions from the prior to the posterior in the context of Bayesian inference for parameter estimation problems. The characterization of…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-27 Ben Mansour Dia

We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kian Ming A. Chai , Edwin V. Bonilla

Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

Diffusion models have excellent capacity to model complex distributions of natural data, which has made them a popular and effective choice for posterior sampling in imaging inverse problems. Existing methods can incorporate any measurement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Benjamin A. Burns , Sara Fridovich-Keil

Variational Bayes methods approximate the posterior density by a family of tractable distributions whose parameters are estimated by optimisation. Variational approximation is useful when exact inference is intractable or very costly. Our…

Computation · Statistics 2023-08-15 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , David Nott

Reconstructing PDE solutions from sparse observations is a core challenge in scientific computing. We present FM4PDE, a flow-matching generative framework that learns the joint distribution of PDE coefficients (or initial states) and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Xifeng Zhang , Jin Zhao

In the past few years, deep generative models, such as generative adversarial networks \autocite{GAN}, variational autoencoders \autocite{vaepaper}, and their variants, have seen wide adoption for the task of modelling complex data…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-02 Guilherme G. P. Freitas Pires , Mário A. T. Figueiredo

Diffusion and flow matching models generate high-fidelity data by simulating paths defined by Ordinary or Stochastic Differential Equations (ODEs/SDEs), starting from a tractable prior distribution. The probability flow ODE formulation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Liangyu Yuan , Ruoyu Wang , Tong Zhao , Dingwen Fu , Mingkun Lei , Beier Zhu , Chi Zhang

Diffusion processes are a class of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) providing a rich family of expressive models that arise naturally in dynamic modelling tasks. Probabilistic inference and learning under generative models with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Prakhar Verma , Vincent Adam , Arno Solin

We show how to use a variational approximation to the logistic function to perform approximate inference in Bayesian networks containing discrete nodes with continuous parents. Essentially, we convert the logistic function to a Gaussian,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Kevin Murphy

In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Ilsang Ohn , Lizhen Lin

Robust Bayesian inference using density power divergence (DPD) has emerged as a promising approach for handling outliers in statistical estimation. Although the DPD-based posterior offers theoretical guarantees of robustness, its practical…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-11 Naruki Sonobe , Tomotaka Momozaki , Tomoyuki Nakagawa

We consider the optimal approximate posterior over the top-layer weights in a Bayesian neural network for regression, and show that it exhibits strong dependencies on the lower-layer weights. We adapt this result to develop a correlated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-23 Sebastian W. Ober , Laurence Aitchison

Due to their conjugate posteriors, Gaussian process priors are attractive for estimating the drift of stochastic differential equations with continuous time observations. However, their performance strongly depends on the choice of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-02-04 Jan van Waaij

We propose a generative multivariate posterior sampler via flow matching. It offers a simple training objective, and does not require access to likelihood evaluation. The method learns a dynamic, block-triangular velocity field in the joint…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-02 Percy S. Zhai , So Won Jeong , Veronika Ročková