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Related papers: Doubly Semi-Implicit Variational Inference

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Continual learning in neural networks aims to learn new tasks without forgetting old tasks. Sequential function-space variational inference (SFSVI) uses a Gaussian variational distribution to approximate the distribution of the outputs of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Menghao Waiyan William Zhu , Pengcheng Hao , Ercan Engin Kuruoğlu

Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational distribution.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Guoqing Zheng , Yiming Yang , Jaime Carbonell

Symbolic regression discovers explicit, interpretable equations without assuming a functional form in advance. A Bayesian approach strengthens this through probability distributions over candidate expressions, thus quantifying uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 James Butterworth , Gevik Grigorian , Alejandro DiazDelaO

Mixture variational distributions in black box variational inference (BBVI) have demonstrated impressive results in challenging density estimation tasks. However, currently scaling the number of mixture components can lead to a linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Alexandra Hotti , Oskar Kviman , Ricky Molén , Víctor Elvira , Jens Lagergren

Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-29 Thang D. Bui , Cuong V. Nguyen , Siddharth Swaroop , Richard E. Turner

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

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

Reconstructing the evolutionary history relating a collection of molecular sequences is the main subject of modern Bayesian phylogenetic inference. However, the commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be inefficient due to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-12 Tianyu Xie , Frederick A. Matsen , Marc A. Suchard , Cheng Zhang

We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-13 Jeremias Knoblauch , Jack Jewson , Theodoros Damoulas

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

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

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

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

Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Hamza Anwar , Quanyan Zhu

Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Daniel Ward , Mark Beaumont , Matteo Fasiolo

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

Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) provide a robust paradigm for Bayesian deep learning. In DGPs, a set of sparse integration locations called inducing points are selected to approximate the posterior distribution of the model. This is done to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Jian Xu , Delu Zeng , John Paisley

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

Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-26 Jiaxin Shi , Shengyang Sun , Jun Zhu

Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-31 Zhanyu Ma , Jalil Taghia , Jun Guo