Related papers: Posterior inference unchained with EL_2O

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

The nonparametric regression model with normal errors has been extensively studied, both from the frequentist and Bayesian viewpoint. A central result in Bayesian nonparametrics is that under assumptions on the prior, the data-generating…

We introduce the sequential neural posterior and likelihood approximation (SNPLA) algorithm. SNPLA is a normalizing flows-based algorithm for inference in implicit models, and therefore is a simulation-based inference method that only…

Sampling from the full posterior distribution of high-dimensional non-linear, non-Gaussian latent dynamical models presents significant computational challenges. While Particle Gibbs (also known as conditional sequential Monte Carlo) is…

Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

We propose a minimum distance estimation method for robust regression in sparse high-dimensional settings. The traditional likelihood-based estimators lack resilience against outliers, a critical issue when dealing with high-dimensional…

The generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) is widely used for analyzing correlated data, particularly in large-scale biomedical and social science applications. Scalable Bayesian inference for GLMMs is challenging because the marginal…

We describe an embarrassingly parallel, anytime Monte Carlo method for likelihood-free models. The algorithm starts with the view that the stochasticity of the pseudo-samples generated by the simulator can be controlled externally by a…

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Recent advancements in Mixed Integer Optimization (MIO) algorithms, paired with hardware enhancements, have led to significant speedups in resolving MIO problems. These strategies have been utilized for optimal subset selection,…

Gaussian processes are distributions over functions that are versatile and mathematically convenient priors in Bayesian modelling. However, their use is often impeded for data with large numbers of observations, $N$, due to the cubic (in…

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…

We consider the extensively studied problem of $\ell_2/\ell_2$ compressed sensing. The main contribution of our work is an improvement over [Gilbert, Li, Porat and Strauss, STOC 2010] with faster decoding time and significantly smaller…

We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…

High-probability analysis of stochastic first-order optimization methods under mild assumptions on the noise has been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. Typically, gradient clipping is one of the key algorithmic ingredients to…

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

An important feature of Bayesian statistics is the opportunity to do sequential inference: the posterior distribution obtained after seeing a dataset can be used as prior for a second inference. However, when Monte Carlo sampling methods…

Bayesian approaches have been successfully integrated into training deep neural networks. One popular family is stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo methods (SG-MCMC), which have gained increasing interest due to their scalability…

In variational inference (VI), the marginal log-likelihood is estimated using the standard evidence lower bound (ELBO), or improved versions as the importance weighted ELBO (IWELBO). We propose the multiple importance sampling ELBO…

Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully…