Related papers: Semi-Implicit Variational Inference
Implicit probabilistic models are a flexible class of models defined by a simulation process for data. They form the basis for theories which encompass our understanding of the physical world. Despite this fundamental nature, the use of…
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) use nonparametric variational families represented by particles to approximate the target distribution according to the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…
Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator…
Stochastic variational inference offers an attractive option as a default method for differentiable probabilistic programming. However, the performance of the variational approach depends on the choice of an appropriate variational family.…
Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…
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…
A key design constraint when implementing Monte Carlo and variational inference algorithms is that it must be possible to cheaply and exactly evaluate the marginal densities of proposal distributions and variational families. This takes…
Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…
Bayesian statistical inference loses predictive optimality when generative models are misspecified. Working within an existing coherent loss-based generalisation of Bayesian inference, we show existing Modular/Cut-model inference is…
Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…
Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…
We propose Diffusion Model Variational Inference (DMVI), a novel method for automated approximate inference in probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). DMVI utilizes diffusion models as variational approximations to the true posterior…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…
Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…
Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…