Related papers: Boosting Black Box Variational Inference
Variational inference (VI) is a central tool in modern machine learning, used to approximate an intractable target density by optimising over a tractable family of distributions. As the variational family cannot typically represent the…
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…
Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…
Many real-world tasks require optimizing expensive black-box functions accessible only through noisy evaluations, a setting commonly addressed with Bayesian optimization (BO). While Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have recently emerged as…
As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…
We present VBPI-Mixtures, an algorithm designed to enhance the accuracy of phylogenetic posterior distributions, particularly for tree-topology and branch-length approximations. Despite the Variational Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference…
Existing Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods typically balance exploration and exploitation to optimize costly objective functions. However, these methods often suffer from a significant one-step bias, which may lead to convergence towards…
Black-box variational inference tries to approximate a complex target distribution though a gradient-based optimization of the parameters of a simpler distribution. Provable convergence guarantees require structural properties of the…
In variational inference (VI), an approximation of the posterior distribution is selected from a family of distributions through numerical optimization. With the most common variational objective function, known as the evidence lower bound…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…
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…
While Variational Inference (VI) is central to modern generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs), its pedagogical treatment is split across disciplines. In statistics, VI is typically framed…
Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…
Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…
We extend several recent results providing symmetry-based guarantees for variational inference (VI) with location-scale families. VI approximates a target density $p$ by the best match $q^*$ in a family $Q$ of tractable distributions that…
We introduce a globally-convergent algorithm for optimizing the tree-reweighted (TRW) variational objective over the marginal polytope. The algorithm is based on the conditional gradient method (Frank-Wolfe) and moves pseudomarginals within…
Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…
We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…
Many computationally-efficient methods for Bayesian deep learning rely on continuous optimization algorithms, but the implementation of these methods requires significant changes to existing code-bases. In this paper, we propose Vprop, a…
Variational inference (VI) is a cornerstone of modern Bayesian learning, enabling approximate inference in complex models. However, its formulation depends on expectations and divergences defined through high-dimensional integrals, often…