Related papers: A Contrastive Divergence for Combining Variational…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Connecting optimal transport and variational inference, we present a principled and systematic framework for sampling and generative modelling centred around divergences on path space. Our work culminates in the development of the…

This paper studies the problem of parameter learning in probabilistic graphical models having latent variables, where the standard approach is the expectation maximization algorithm alternating expectation (E) and maximization (M) steps.…

Variational Inference (VI) is an attractive alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) due to its computational efficiency in the case of large datasets and/or complex models with high-dimensional parameters. However, evaluating the…

We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…

Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…

Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…

We present a unified theory of the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) methods using a novel density matrix formulation of VMC. We introduce an efficient algorithm for VMC to compute correlation…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

Estimating the log-likelihood gradient with respect to the parameters of a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) typically requires sampling using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. To save computation time, the Markov chains are only…

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Contrastive divergence (CD) is a promising method of inference in high dimensional distributions with intractable normalizing constants, however, the theoretical foundations justifying its use are somewhat shaky. This document proposes a…

This study tackles the efficient estimation of Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence in Dirichlet Mixture Models (DMM), crucial for clustering compositional data. Despite the significance of DMMs, obtaining an analytically tractable solution for…

We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…

We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Bayesian posterior inference. Though popular, VB comes with few theoretical guarantees, most of which focus on well-specified models. However, models…

In Variational Inference (VI), coordinate-ascent and gradient-based approaches are two major types of algorithms for approximating difficult-to-compute probability densities. In real-world implementations of complex models, Monte Carlo…

Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…

Bayesian phylogenetic inference is often conducted via local or sequential search over topologies and branch lengths using algorithms such as random-walk Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or Combinatorial Sequential Monte Carlo (CSMC).…

The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…