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Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) enjoy an intuitive connection to manifold learning: in training the decoder/generator is optimized to approximate a homeomorphism between the data distribution and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Henry Li , Ofir Lindenbaum , Xiuyuan Cheng , Alexander Cloninger

This paper introduces two variational inference approaches for infinite-dimensional inverse problems, developed through gradient descent with a constant learning rate. The proposed methods enable efficient approximate sampling from the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Jiaming Sui , Junxiong Jia , Jinglai Li

A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…

Computation · Statistics 2013-10-15 Alexis Roche

This study investigates the variational posterior convergence rates of inverse problems for partial differential equations (PDEs) with parameters in Besov spaces $B_{pp}^\alpha$ ($p \geq 1$) which are modeled naturally in a Bayesian manner…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shaokang Zu , Junxiong Jia , Zhiguo Wang

Highly expressive directed latent variable models, such as sigmoid belief networks, are difficult to train on large datasets because exact inference in them is intractable and none of the approximate inference methods that have been applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-06 Andriy Mnih , Karol Gregor

Diffusion models (DMs) have proven to be effective in modeling high-dimensional distributions, leading to their widespread adoption for representing complex priors in Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs). However, current DM-based posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Haoxuan Chen , Yinuo Ren , Martin Renqiang Min , Lexing Ying , Zachary Izzo

Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-03 Jonathan H. Huggins , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Trevor Campbell , Tamara Broderick

Background: In medical imaging, images are usually treated as deterministic, while their uncertainties are largely underexplored. Purpose: This work aims at using deep learning to efficiently estimate posterior distributions of imaging…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-20 Xiaofeng Liu , Thibault Marin , Tiss Amal , Jonghye Woo , Georges El Fakhri , Jinsong Ouyang

Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-22 Hachem Saddiki , Andrew C. Trapp , Patrick Flaherty

While Bayesian inference provides a principled framework for reasoning under uncertainty, its widespread adoption is limited by the intractability of exact posterior computation, necessitating the use of approximate inference. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 George Whittle , Juliusz Ziomek , Jacob Rawling , Maike A. Osborne

Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-03 Giovanni Piccirilli , Aluísio Pinheiro

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic

Probabilistic models with discrete latent variables naturally capture datasets composed of discrete classes. However, they are difficult to train efficiently, since backpropagation through discrete variables is generally not possible. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-04-25 Jason Tyler Rolfe

This paper presents DetailFlow, a coarse-to-fine 1D autoregressive (AR) image generation method that models images through a novel next-detail prediction strategy. By learning a resolution-aware token sequence supervised with progressively…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Yiheng Liu , Liao Qu , Huichao Zhang , Xu Wang , Yi Jiang , Yiming Gao , Hu Ye , Xian Li , Shuai Wang , Daniel K. Du , Fangmin Chen , Zehuan Yuan , Xinglong Wu

Through sequential construction of posteriors on observing data online, Bayes' theorem provides a natural framework for continual learning. We develop Variational Auto-Regressive Gaussian Processes (VAR-GPs), a principled posterior updating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-15 Sanyam Kapoor , Theofanis Karaletsos , Thang D. Bui

Scalable algorithms of posterior approximation allow Bayesian nonparametrics such as Dirichlet process mixture to scale up to larger dataset at fractional cost. Recent algorithms, notably the stochastic variational inference performs local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Kart-Leong Lim , Xudong Jiang

This paper develops a methodology for approximating the posterior first two moments of the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. Partially specified probability models, which are defined only by specifying means and variances, are…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-01-27 K. Triantafyllopoulos , P. J. Harrison

The article develops a hybrid Variational Bayes algorithm that combines the mean-field and fixed-form Variational Bayes methods. The new estimation algorithm can be used to approximate any posterior without relying on conjugate priors. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-08-09 David J Nott , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Anthony Y. C. Kuk , Robert Kohn

We study posterior sampling for inverse problems in discrete state spaces using discrete diffusion models as generative priors. While continuous diffusion models have become widely used for inverse problems, their discrete counterparts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Chaitanya Amballa , Sattwik Basu , Jorge Vančo Sampedro , Romit Roy Choudhury