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The traditional two-stage approach to causal inference first identifies a single causal model (or equivalence class of models), which is then used to answer causal queries. However, this neglects any epistemic model uncertainty. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Christian Toth , Christian Knoll , Franz Pernkopf , Robert Peharz

Phylogenetic inference, the task of reconstructing how related sequences evolved from common ancestors, is a central objective in evolutionary genomics. The current state-of-the-art methods exploit probabilistic models of sequence evolution…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2026-02-19 Luc Blassel , Noémie Sauvage , Pierre Barrat-Charlaix , Bastien Boussau , Nicolas Lartillot , Laurent Jacob

Modern variational inference (VI) uses stochastic gradients to avoid intractable expectations, enabling large-scale probabilistic inference in complex models. VI posits a family of approximating distributions q and then finds the member of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-24 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , David Blei

Transformation-based methods have been an attractive approach in non-parametric inference for problems such as unconditional and conditional density estimation due to their unique hierarchical structure that models the data as flexible…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-06 Sean Plummer , Shuang Zhou , Anirban Bhattacharya , David Dunson , Debdeep Pati

This paper introduces an algorithm-agnostic approach to feature-based time series clustering via amortized neural inference. By training neural networks to approximate the optimal partitioning rule from simulated data, the proposed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-14 Ángel López-Oriona , Ying Sun

Amortized simulator-based inference offers a powerful framework for tackling Bayesian inference in computational fields such as engineering or neuroscience, increasingly leveraging modern generative methods like diffusion models to map…

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

We propose a new Bayesian Neural Net formulation that affords variational inference for which the evidence lower bound is analytically tractable subject to a tight approximation. We achieve this tractability by (i) decomposing ReLU…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-13 Manuel Haussmann , Fred A. Hamprecht , Melih Kandemir

Variational inference, as an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, has played a transformative role in enabling scalable computation for complex Bayesian models. Nevertheless, existing approaches often depend on either rigid…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-21 Somjit Roy , Pritam Dey , Debdeep Pati , Bani K. Mallick

We present a semi-amortized variational inference framework designed for computationally feasible uncertainty quantification in 2D full-waveform inversion to explore the multimodal posterior distribution without dimensionality reduction.…

Geophysics · Physics 2024-12-06 Ziyi Yin , Rafael Orozco , Felix J. Herrmann

We derive streamlined mean field variational Bayes algorithms for fitting linear mixed models with crossed random effects. In the most general situation, where the dimensions of the crossed groups are arbitrarily large, streamlining is…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-15 Marianne Menictas , Gioia Di Credico , Matt P. Wand

Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-25 Yoon Kim , Sam Wiseman , Andrew C. Miller , David Sontag , Alexander M. Rush

Inferring causal structure poses a combinatorial search problem that typically involves evaluating structures with a score or independence test. The resulting search is costly, and designing suitable scores or tests that capture prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Lars Lorch , Scott Sussex , Jonas Rothfuss , Andreas Krause , Bernhard Schölkopf

Likelihood-free inference refers to inference when a likelihood function cannot be explicitly evaluated, which is often the case for models based on simulators. Most of the literature is based on sample-based `Approximate Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-22 Conor Durkan , George Papamakarios , Iain Murray

This paper shows that the implicit bias of gradient descent on linearly separable data is exactly characterized by the optimal solution of a dual optimization problem given by a smoothed margin, even for general losses. This is in contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

We propose to learn deep undirected graphical models (i.e., MRFs) with a non-ELBO objective for which we can calculate exact gradients. In particular, we optimize a saddle-point objective deriving from the Bethe free energy approximation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Sam Wiseman , Yoon Kim

We study mean-field variational inference in a Bayesian linear model when the sample size n is comparable to the dimension p. In high dimensions, the common approach of minimizing a Kullback-Leibler divergence from the posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-11-16 Michael Celentano , Zhou Fan , Licong Lin , Song Mei

Selection bias arises when the probability that an observation enters a dataset depends on variables related to the quantities of interest, leading to systematic distortions in estimation and uncertainty quantification. For example, in…

We present a new approach to automatic amortized inference in universal probabilistic programs which improves performance compared to current methods. Our approach is a variation of inference compilation (IC) which leverages deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 William Harvey , Andreas Munk , Atılım Güneş Baydin , Alexander Bergholm , Frank Wood

We propose a novel approach to sequential Bayesian inference based on variational Bayes (VB). The key insight is that, in the online setting, we do not need to add the KL term to regularize to the prior (which comes from the posterior at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-01 Matt Jones , Peter Chang , Kevin Murphy