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Efficient exploration is one of the most important issues in deep reinforcement learning. To address this issue, recent methods consider the value function parameters as random variables, and resort variational inference to approximate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Haotian Zhang , Yuhao Wang , Jianyong Sun , Zongben Xu

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular model for density estimation and representation learning. Canonically, the variational principle suggests to prefer an expressive inference model so that the variational approximation is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-10 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Shengjia Zhao , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Stefano Ermon

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

We present a generative modeling approach based on the variational inference framework for likelihood-free simulation-based inference. The method leverages latent variables within variational autoencoders to efficiently estimate complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mayank Nautiyal , Andrey Shternshis , Andreas Hellander , Prashant Singh

We present a general method for deriving collapsed variational inference algo- rithms for probabilistic models in the conjugate exponential family. Our method unifies many existing approaches to collapsed variational inference. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-05 James Hensman , Magnus Rattray , Neil D. Lawrence

Classical approaches for approximate inference depend on cleverly designed variational distributions and bounds. Modern approaches employ amortized variational inference, which uses a neural network to approximate any posterior without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Yiming Yan , Melissa Ailem , Fei Sha

Amortized inference promises fast test-time Bayesian inference, but existing methods are inherently tied to fixed models. Extending amortization to unseen models typically requires retraining or costly test-time finetuning. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Joohwan Ko , Justin Domke

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

Likelihood-free methods are an essential tool for performing inference for implicit models which can be simulated from, but for which the corresponding likelihood is intractable. However, common likelihood-free methods do not scale well to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-15 Christopher Drovandi , David J Nott , David T Frazier

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-26 Jiaxin Shi , Shengyang Sun , Jun Zhu

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a very successful generative model whose key element is the so called amortized inference network, which can perform test time inference using a single feed forward pass. Unfortunately, this comes at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic

We consider amortized Bayesian inference for nonlinear inverse problems in settings where only samples from the joint distribution of parameters and observations are available. Classical methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo require…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Hojjat Kaveh , Ricardo Baptista , Andrew M. Stuart

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

Amortised inference enables scalable learning of sequential latent-variable models (LVMs) with the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this setting, variational posteriors are often only partially conditioned. While the true posteriors depend,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Justin Bayer , Maximilian Soelch , Atanas Mirchev , Baris Kayalibay , Patrick van der Smagt

Variational inference methods have been shown to lead to significant improvements in the computational efficiency of approximate Bayesian inference in mixed multinomial logit models when compared to standard Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Computation · Statistics 2020-04-14 Filipe Rodrigues

Modern learning systems increasingly rely on amortized learning - the idea of reusing computation or inductive biases shared across tasks to enable rapid generalization to novel problems. This principle spans a range of approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sarthak Mittal , Divyat Mahajan , Guillaume Lajoie , Mohammad Pezeshki

Variational autoencoders employ an amortized inference model to approximate the posterior of latent variables. However, such amortized variational inference faces two challenges: (1) the limited posterior expressiveness of fully-factorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Yookoon Park , Chris Dongjoo Kim , Gunhee Kim

Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Joseph Marino , Yisong Yue , Stephan Mandt

Real-world data is frequently noisy and ambiguous. In crowdsourcing, for example, human annotators may assign conflicting class labels to the same instances. Partial-label learning (PLL) addresses this challenge by training classifiers when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tobias Fuchs , Nadja Klein

Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) aim to capture shared latent representations by integrating information from different data modalities. A significant challenge is accurately inferring representations from any subset of modalities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yuta Oshima , Masahiro Suzuki , Yutaka Matsuo