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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…

The curvature regularities are well-known for providing strong priors in the continuity of edges, which have been applied to a wide range of applications in image processing and computer vision. However, these models are usually non-convex,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-12-03 Qiuxiang Zhong , Ke Yin , Yuping Duan

Estimating the gradients of stochastic nodes in stochastic computational graphs is one of the crucial research questions in the deep generative modeling community, which enables the gradient descent optimization on neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Weonyoung Joo , Dongjun Kim , Seungjae Shin , Il-Chul Moon

The inference of deep hierarchical models is problematic due to strong dependencies between the hierarchies. We investigate a specific transformation of the model parameters based on the multivariate distributional transform. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-12 Jakob Knollmüller , Torsten A. Enßlin

Existing deterministic variational inference approaches for diffusion processes use simple proposals and target the marginal density of the posterior. We construct the variational process as a controlled version of the prior process and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Christian Wildner , Heinz Koeppl

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

We propose a variance reduction framework for variational inference using the Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method. Our framework is built on reparameterized gradient estimators and "recycles" parameters obtained from past update history in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-03 Masahiro Fujisawa , Issei Sato

In machine learning and statistical data analysis, we often run into objective function that is a summation: the number of terms in the summation possibly is equal to the sample size, which can be enormous. In such a setting, the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-30 Yiling Luo , Xiaoming Huo , Yajun Mei

Scene graph generation is a structured prediction task aiming to explicitly model objects and their relationships via constructing a visually-grounded scene graph for an input image. Currently, the message passing neural network based mean…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Daqi Liu , Miroslaw Bober , Josef Kittler

Learning models with categorical variables requires optimizing expectations over discrete distributions, a setting in which stochastic gradient-based optimization is challenging due to the non-differentiability of categorical sampling. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Samson Gourevitch , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson , Yazid Janati

Variational methods are attractive for computing Bayesian inference for highly parametrized models and large datasets where exact inference is impractical. They approximate a target distribution - either the posterior or an augmented…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-21 Michael Stanley Smith , Ruben Loaiza-Maya , David J. Nott

We propose a new approach to inference in tightly identified and large-scale structural vector autoregressions based on a reparameterization that enables imposing identifying inequality restrictions through continuously differentiable…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-22 Markku Lanne , Jani Luoto , Adam Rybarczyk

Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier

Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Aleksandr Shestakov , Valery Parfenov , Aleksandr Beznosikov

We tackle the problem of reflectance estimation from a set of multi-view images, assuming known geometry. The approach we put forward turns the input images into reflectance maps, through a robust variational method. The variational model…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-24 Jean Mélou , Yvain Quéau , Jean-Denis Durou , Fabien Castan , Daniel Cremers

We consider a hidden Markov model, where the signal process, given by a diffusion, is only indirectly observed through some noisy measurements. The article develops a variational method for approximating the hidden states of the signal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-10-26 Tobias Sutter , Arnab Ganguly , Heinz Koeppl

Despite the frequent use of agent-based models (ABMs) for studying social phenomena, parameter estimation remains a challenge, often relying on costly simulation-based heuristics. This work uses variational inference to estimate the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Jacopo Lenti , Fabrizio Silvestri , Gianmarco De Francisci Morales

Variational inference transforms posterior inference into parametric optimization thereby enabling the use of latent variable models where otherwise impractical. However, variational inference can be finicky when different variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Da Tang , Rajesh Ranganath

Many methods for machine learning rely on approximate inference from intractable probability distributions. Variational inference approximates such distributions by tractable models that can be subsequently used for approximate inference.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Oleg Arenz , Mingjun Zhong , Gerhard Neumann

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-15 Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Shakir Mohamed