Related papers: Boosting Black Box Variational Inference
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…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…
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…
Bayesian methods are particularly effective for addressing inverse problems due to their ability to manage uncertainties inherent in the inference process. However, employing these methods with costly forward models poses significant…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is commonly based on group sampling to estimate advantages and stabilize policy updates. In practice, computational limits often rule out very large groups, so training proceeds with…
Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…
Modern neural network architectures have achieved remarkable accuracies but remain highly dependent on their training data, often lacking interpretability in their learned mappings. While effective on large datasets, they tend to overfit on…
In Bayesian optimization (BO) for expensive black-box optimization tasks, acquisition function (AF) guides sequential sampling and plays a pivotal role for efficient convergence to better optima. Prevailing AFs usually rely on artificial…
Mixture variational distributions in black box variational inference (BBVI) have demonstrated impressive results in challenging density estimation tasks. However, currently scaling the number of mixture components can lead to a linear…
Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization (TVBO) is the go-to framework for optimizing a time-varying, expensive, noisy black-box function $f$. However, most of the asymptotic guarantees offered by TVBO algorithms rely on the assumption that…
Boosting is a generic learning method for classification and regression. Yet, as the number of base hypotheses becomes larger, boosting can lead to a deterioration of test performance. Overfitting is an important and ubiquitous phenomenon,…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful framework for optimizing black-box, expensive-to-evaluate functions. Over the past decade, many algorithms have been proposed to integrate cheaper, lower-fidelity approximations of the objective…
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…
Recent research has seen several advances relevant to black-box VI, but the current state of automatic posterior inference is unclear. One such advance is the use of normalizing flows to define flexible posterior densities for deep latent…
We consider the problem of estimating complex statistical latent variable models using variational Bayes methods. These methods are used when exact posterior inference is either infeasible or computationally expensive, and they approximate…
Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…