Related papers: Boosting Black Box Variational Inference

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high-dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework…

Recent work in variational inference (VI) uses ideas from Monte Carlo estimation to tighten the lower bounds on the log-likelihood that are used as objectives. However, there is no systematic understanding of how optimizing different…

Many crucial problems in deep learning and statistical inference are caused by a variational gap, i.e., a difference between model evidence (log-likelihood) and evidence lower bound (ELBO). In particular, in a classical VAE setting that…

We consider derivative-free black-box global optimization of expensive noisy functions, when most of the randomness in the objective is produced by a few influential scalar random inputs. We present a new Bayesian global optimization…

This article considers Bayesian model selection via mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Towards this goal, we study the non-asymptotic properties of MF inference under the Bayesian framework that allows latent variables and model…

We introduce an order-invariant reinforcement learning framework for black-box combinatorial optimization. Classical estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) often rely on learning explicit variable dependency graphs, which can be…

Many real-world scientific and industrial applications require the optimization of expensive black-box functions. Bayesian Optimization (BO) provides an effective framework for such problems. However, traditional BO methods are prone to get…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful approach for optimizing complex and expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. Its importance is underscored in many applications, notably including hyperparameter tuning, but its efficacy depends on…

Bayesian optimisation (BO) algorithms have shown remarkable success in applications involving expensive black-box functions. Traditionally BO has been set as a sequential decision-making process which estimates the utility of query points…

Bayesian optimization and Lipschitz optimization have developed alternative techniques for optimizing black-box functions. They each exploit a different form of prior about the function. In this work, we explore strategies to combine these…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a well-established method for addressing black-box optimization problems. In many real-world scenarios, optimization often involves multiple functions, emphasizing the importance of leveraging data and learned…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…

Black Box Variational Inference is a promising framework in a succession of recent efforts to make Variational Inference more ``black box". However, in basic version it either fails to converge due to instability or requires some…

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) effectively scales LLM reasoning but incurs prohibitive computational costs due to its extensive group-based sampling requirement. While recent selective data utilization methods can mitigate this…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method to optimize costly black-box functions. While traditional BO optimizes each new target task from scratch, meta-learning has emerged as a way to leverage knowledge from related tasks to optimize…

Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep…

Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…

Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…

We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…