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In the recent years, Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have received strong interest as a method to solve PDE driven systems, in particular for data assimilation purpose. This method is still in its infancy, with many shortcomings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Nilo Schwencke , Cyril Furtlehner

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

We consider the problem of approximating a function by an element of a nonlinear manifold which admits a differentiable parametrization, typical examples being neural networks with differentiable activation functions or tensor networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Anthony Nouy , Agustín Somacal

Deep probabilistic time series forecasting models have become an integral part of machine learning. While several powerful generative models have been proposed, we provide evidence that their associated inference models are oftentimes too…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Chen Qiu , Stephan Mandt , Maja Rudolph

Current methods for learning graphical models with latent variables and a fixed structure estimate optimal values for the model parameters. Whereas this approach usually produces overfitting and suboptimal generalization performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Hagai Attias

Diffusion models have become emerging generative models. Their sampling process involves multiple steps, and in each step the models predict the noise from a noisy sample. When the models make prediction, the output deviates from the ground…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Shifeng Xu , Yanzhu Liu , Adams Wai-Kin Kong

Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-14 Thomas Bird , Julius Kunze , David Barber

Variational approximations to Gaussian processes (GPs) typically use a small set of inducing points to form a low-rank approximation to the covariance matrix. In this work, we instead exploit a sparse approximation of the precision matrix.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Luhuan Wu , Geoff Pleiss , John Cunningham

Modern deep learning models generalize remarkably well in-distribution, despite being overparametrized and trained with little to no explicit regularization. Instead, current theory credits implicit regularization imposed by the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jonathan Wenger , Beau Coker , Juraj Marusic , John P. Cunningham

The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-18 Alexander Immer , Guillaume P. Dehaene

We consider the probabilistic analogue to neural network matrix factorization (Dziugaite & Roy, 2015), which we construct with Bayesian neural networks and fit with variational inference. We find that a linear model fit with variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-16 Onno Kampman , Creighton Heaukulani

The natural gradient allows for more efficient gradient descent by removing dependencies and biases inherent in a function's parameterization. Several papers present the topic thoroughly and precisely. It remains a very difficult idea to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-10 Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

We introduce a variational Bayesian neural network where the parameters are governed via a probability distribution on random matrices. Specifically, we employ a matrix variate Gaussian \cite{gupta1999matrix} parameter posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-24 Christos Louizos , Max Welling

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-26 Yash Patel , Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier , Ambuj Tewari

Optimising probabilistic models is a well-studied field in statistics. However, its connection with the training of generative models remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we show that the evolution of time-varying generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-16 Song Liu , Leyang Wang , Yakun Wang

Estimating an individual's counterfactual outcomes under interventions is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, facial images) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Yulun Wu , Louie McConnell , Claudia Iriondo

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Thomas Guilmeau , Hadrien Hendrikx , Florence Forbes

Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-27 Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

The conditional moment problem is a powerful formulation for describing structural causal parameters in terms of observables, a prominent example being instrumental variable regression. A standard approach reduces the problem to a finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Andrew Bennett , Nathan Kallus

Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-29 Tobias Plötz , Anne S. Wannenwetsch , Stefan Roth