Related papers: Boosting Black Box Variational Inference
We present a novel approach to Bayesian inference and general Bayesian computation that is defined through a sequential decision loop. Our method defines a recursive partitioning of the sample space. It neither relies on gradients nor…
We propose an analytical solution for approximating the gradient of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) in variational inference problems where the statistical model is a Bayesian network consisting of observations drawn from a mixture of a…
Several fundamental problems in science and engineering consist of global optimization tasks involving unknown high-dimensional (black-box) functions that map a set of controllable variables to the outcomes of an expensive experiment.…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…
Compared to "black-box" models, like random forests and deep neural networks, explainable boosting machines (EBMs) are considered "glass-box" models that can be competitively accurate while also maintaining a higher degree of transparency…
We introduce a highly expressive yet distinctly tractable family for black-box variational inference (BBVI). Each member of this family is a weighted product of experts (PoE), and each weighted expert in the product is proportional to a…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an indispensable paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, standard policy optimization methods, such as Group Relative Policy…
Gradient boosting, a method of building additive ensembles from weak learners, has established itself as a practical and theoretically-motivated approach to approximate functions, especially using decision tree weak learners. Comparable…
Some real problems require the evaluation of expensive and noisy objective functions. Moreover, the analytical expression of these objective functions may be unknown. These functions are known as black-boxes, for example, estimating the…
Reducing reinforcement learning to supervised learning is a well-studied and effective approach that leverages the benefits of compact function approximation to deal with large-scale Markov decision processes. Independently, the boosting…
Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…
The theory of boosting provides a computational framework for aggregating approximate weak learning algorithms, which perform marginally better than a random predictor, into an accurate strong learner. In the realizable case, the success of…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sequential decision-making tool widely used for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable adaptability in low-data regimes, making them promising…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, dominant approaches like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face critical…
Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (VBMC) is a recently introduced framework that uses Gaussian process surrogates to perform approximate Bayesian inference in models with black-box, non-cheap likelihoods. In this work, we extend VBMC to deal…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sequential approach for optimizing black-box objective functions using zeroth-order noisy observations. In BO, Gaussian processes (GPs) are employed as probabilistic surrogate models to estimate the objective…
We propose an optimization algorithm for Variational Inference (VI) in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates where the variational space is a Riemann manifold. We develop an efficient algorithm for Gaussian…
Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…
Variational inference (VI) provides a principled framework for estimating posterior distributions over model parameters, enabling explicit modeling of weight uncertainty during optimization. By capturing this uncertainty, VI improves the…