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Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

Probabilistic state estimation is essential for robots navigating uncertain environments. Accurately and efficiently managing uncertainty in estimated states is key to robust robotic operation. However, nonlinearities in robotic platforms…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Min-Won Seo , Solmaz S. Kia

We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Graham Fyffe

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

Optimization is widely used in statistics, and often efficiently delivers point estimates on useful spaces involving structural constraints or combinatorial structure. To quantify uncertainty, Gibbs posterior exponentiates the negative loss…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-23 Cheng Zeng , Eleni Dilma , Jason Xu , Leo L Duan

Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Sharmila Karumuri , Ilias Bilionis

Due to their uncertainty quantification, Bayesian solutions to inverse problems are the framework of choice in applications that are risk averse. These benefits come at the cost of computations that are in general, intractable. New advances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Rafael Orozco , Ali Siahkoohi , Mathias Louboutin , Felix J. Herrmann

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) enable expressive hierarchical Bayesian modeling but pose substantial challenges for posterior inference, especially over inducing variables. Denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI) addresses this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Jian Xu , Qibin Zhao , John Paisley , Delu Zeng

Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Parth Paritosh , Nikolay Atanasov , Sonia Martinez

We develop an automated variational inference method for Bayesian structured prediction problems with Gaussian process (GP) priors and linear-chain likelihoods. Our approach does not need to know the details of the structured likelihood…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-15 Pietro Galliani , Amir Dezfouli , Edwin V. Bonilla , Novi Quadrianto

Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-03 Jonathan H. Huggins , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Trevor Campbell , Tamara Broderick

We propose a novel approach to perform approximate Bayesian inference in complex models such as Bayesian neural networks. The approach is more scalable to large data than Markov Chain Monte Carlo, it embraces more expressive models than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-07 Joel Janek Dabrowski , Daniel Edward Pagendam

We propose a general framework for obtaining probabilistic solutions to PDE-based inverse problems. Bayesian methods are attractive for uncertainty quantification but assume knowledge of the likelihood model or data generation process. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-28 Youngsoo Baek , Wilkins Aquino , Sayan Mukherjee

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

The digital telecommunications receiver is an important context for inference methodology, the key objective being to minimize the expected loss function in recovering the transmitted information. For that criterion, the optimal decision is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Viet Hung Tran

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

We propose a posterior for Bayesian Likelihood-Free Inference (LFI) based on generalized Bayesian inference. To define the posterior, we use Scoring Rules (SRs), which evaluate probabilistic models given an observation. In LFI, we can…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-24 Lorenzo Pacchiardi , Sherman Khoo , Ritabrata Dutta

We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens