Related papers: Taming VAEs
We propose constrained causal Bayesian optimization (cCBO), an approach for finding interventions in a known causal graph that optimize a target variable under some constraints. cCBO first reduces the search space by exploiting the graph…
Recent advancements have established Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a pivotal paradigm for aligning generative models with human intent. However, group-based optimization frameworks (e.g., GRPO) face a critical limitation: the rapid decay…
Powerful generative models, particularly in Natural Language Modelling, are commonly trained by maximizing a variational lower bound on the data log likelihood. These models often suffer from poor use of their latent variable, with ad-hoc…
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,…
While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more…
Combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging due to their discrete structure and exponentially large solution space. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have enabled the learning heuristics directly from…
Variational autoencdoers (VAE) are a popular approach to generative modelling. However, exploiting the capabilities of VAEs in practice can be difficult. Recent work on regularised and entropic autoencoders have begun to explore the…
This paper presents a framework to tackle constrained combinatorial optimization problems using deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, we extend the Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) theory in order to deal with constraints in…
Resource constrained job scheduling is a hard combinatorial optimisation problem that originates in the mining industry. Off-the-shelf solvers cannot solve this problem satisfactorily in reasonable timeframes, while other solution methods…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used deep generative models capable of learning unsupervised latent representations of data. Such representations are often difficult to interpret or control. We consider the problem of…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They enable scalable approximate posterior inference in latent-variable models using variational inference (VI). A VAE posits a variational family…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be remarkably effective in recovering model latent spaces for several computer vision tasks. However, currently trained VAEs, for a number of reasons, seem to fall short in learning…
Gradient-free optimization methods, such as surrogate based optimization (SBO) methods, and genetic (GAs), or evolutionary (EAs) algorithms have gained popularity in the field of constrained optimization of expensive black-box functions.…
Large Language Model (LLM)-based optimization has recently shown promise for autonomous problem solving, yet most approaches still cast LLMs as passive constraint checkers rather than proactive strategy designers, limiting their…
The 2021 NeurIPS Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) competition was designed with the goal of improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning…
Gradient-based meta-learning techniques are both widely applicable and proficient at solving challenging few-shot learning and fast adaptation problems. However, they have practical difficulties when operating on high-dimensional parameter…
A body of work has been done to automate machine learning algorithm to highlight the importance of model choice. Automating the process of choosing the best forecasting model and its corresponding parameters can result to improve a wide…
Probabilistic models with hierarchical-latent-variable structures provide state-of-the-art results amongst non-autoregressive, unsupervised density-based models. However, the most common approach to training such models based on Variational…
We propose a simple, tractable lower bound on the mutual information contained in the joint generative density of any latent variable generative model: the GILBO (Generative Information Lower BOund). It offers a data-independent measure of…