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Although deep reinforcement learning has advanced significantly over the past several years, sample efficiency remains a major challenge. Careful choice of input representations can help improve efficiency depending on the structure present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 John Mern , Dorsa Sadigh , Mykel Kochenderfer

Approximate bi-level optimization (ABLO) consists of (outer-level) optimization problems, involving numerical (inner-level) optimization loops. While ABLO has many applications across deep learning, it suffers from time and memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Valerii Likhosherstov , Xingyou Song , Krzysztof Choromanski , Jared Davis , Adrian Weller

In this paper we apply the previously introduced approximation method based on the ANOVA (analysis of variance) decomposition and Grouped Transformations to synthetic and real data. The advantage of this method is the interpretability of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-31 Daniel Potts , Michael Schmischke

Variational Inference makes a trade-off between the capacity of the variational family and the tractability of finding an approximate posterior distribution. Instead, Boosting Variational Inference allows practitioners to obtain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Gideon Dresdner , Saurav Shekhar , Fabian Pedregosa , Francesco Locatello , Gunnar Rätsch

A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Victor Gallego , David Rios Insua

In this work, we introduce a learning model designed to meet the needs of applications in which computational resources are limited, and robustness and interpretability are prioritized. Learning problems can be formulated as constrained…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-26 Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Annealing-based neural samplers seek to amortize sampling from unnormalized distributions by training neural networks to transport a family of densities interpolating from source to target. A crucial design choice in the training phase of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ezra Erives , Bowen Jing , Peter Holderrieth , Tommi Jaakkola

Imitation learning seeks to learn an expert policy from sampled demonstrations. However, in the real world, it is often difficult to find a perfect expert and avoiding dangerous behaviors becomes relevant for safety reasons. We present the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-26 David Venuto , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Rola Dali , Jhelum Chakravorty , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup

Unsupervised learning with functional data is an emerging paradigm of machine learning research with applications to computer vision, climate modeling and physical systems. A natural way of modeling functional data is by learning operators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Jacob H. Seidman , Georgios Kissas , George J. Pappas , Paris Perdikaris

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

We introduce a new multimodal optimization approach called Natural Variational Annealing (NVA) that combines the strengths of three foundational concepts to simultaneously search for multiple global and local modes of black-box nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-18 Tâm LeMinh , Julyan Arbel , Thomas Möllenhoff , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Florence Forbes

Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Francesco D'Angelo , Vincent Fortuin

How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Diederik P Kingma , Max Welling

Amortised inference enables scalable learning of sequential latent-variable models (LVMs) with the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this setting, variational posteriors are often only partially conditioned. While the true posteriors depend,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Justin Bayer , Maximilian Soelch , Atanas Mirchev , Baris Kayalibay , Patrick van der Smagt

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

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…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-07 Dongkyu Derek Cho , Won Chang , Jaewoo Park

While recent state-of-the-art results for adversarial imitation-learning algorithms are encouraging, recent works exploring the imitation learning from observation (ILO) setting, where trajectories \textit{only} contain expert observations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Dilip Arumugam , Debadeepta Dey , Alekh Agarwal , Asli Celikyilmaz , Elnaz Nouri , Bill Dolan

In this study, we propose the leveraging of interpretability for tasks beyond purely the purpose of explainability. In particular, this study puts forward a novel strategy for leveraging gradient-based interpretability in the realm of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Devinder Kumar , Ibrahim Ben-Daya , Kanav Vats , Jeffery Feng , Graham Taylor and , Alexander Wong

Variable importance is one of the most widely used measures for interpreting machine learning with significant interest from both statistics and machine learning communities. Recently, increasing attention has been directed toward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-22 Xiaohan Wang , Yunzhe Zhou , Giles Hooker

Synthesizing realistic and diverse anomalous samples from limited data is vital for robust model generalization. However, existing methods struggle to reconcile fidelity and diversity, often hampered by distribution misalignment and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Fuyun Wang , Yuanzhi Wang , Xu Guo , Sujia Huang , Tong Zhang , Dan Wang , Hui Yan , Xin Liu , Zhen Cui