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Related papers: Unbiased Implicit Variational Inference

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Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-24 Yvann Le Fay , Nicolas Chopin , Simon Barthelmé

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Nan Feng , Xun Huan

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Pielok , Bernd Bischl , David Rügamer

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

Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been…

Current variational inference methods for hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric models can neither characterize the correlation structure among latent variables due to the mean-field setting, nor infer the true posterior dimension because of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Yirui Liu , Xinghao Qiao , Jessica Lam

A multi-layer deep Gaussian process (DGP) model is a hierarchical composition of GP models with a greater expressive power. Exact DGP inference is intractable, which has motivated the recent development of deterministic and stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Haibin Yu , Yizhou Chen , Zhongxiang Dai , Kian Hsiang Low , Patrick Jaillet

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact…

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-03 Giovanni Piccirilli , Aluísio Pinheiro

While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Jiawei Tang , Xinyan Du , Hui Liu , Junhui Hou , Yuheng Jia

Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Minyoung Kim

Ill-posed imaging inverse problems remain challenging due to the ambiguity in mapping degraded observations to clean images. Diffusion-based generative priors have recently shown promise, but typically rely on computationally intensive…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-13 Ayush Varshney , Katherine L. Bouman , Berthy T. Feng

This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Neng Wan , Dapeng Li , Naira Hovakimyan

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is a useful tool for efficiently learning probabilistic models in machine learning. Generally approximate posteriors learned by ADVI are forced to be unimodal in order to facilitate use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Warren R. Morningstar , Sharad M. Vikram , Cusuh Ham , Andrew Gallagher , Joshua V. Dillon

When used as a surrogate objective for maximum likelihood estimation in latent variable models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) produces state-of-the-art results. Inspired by this, we consider the extension of the ELBO to a family of lower…

A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Lucas Kock , Scott A. Sisson , G. S. Rodrigues , David J. Nott

Predictive uncertainty quantification is crucial for reliable decision-making in various applied domains. Bayesian neural networks offer a powerful framework for this task. However, defining meaningful priors and ensuring computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Yijia Liu , Xiao Wang

Modern deep learning models generalize remarkably well in-distribution, despite being overparametrized and trained with little to no explicit regularization. Instead, current theory credits implicit regularization imposed by the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jonathan Wenger , Beau Coker , Juraj Marusic , John P. Cunningham