English
Related papers

Related papers: Universal Boosting Variational Inference

200 papers

Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…

Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Justin Domke , Daniel Sheldon

Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular and computationally efficient method to approximate the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference, especially when the exact posterior is analytically intractable and sampling-based approaches are…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-30 Jiaming Liu , Meng Li

We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Martin Magris , Mostafa Shabani , Alexandros Iosifidis

Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

When approximating an intractable density via variational inference (VI) the variational family is typically chosen as a simple parametric family that very likely does not contain the target. This raises the question: Under which conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Lena Zellinger , Antonio Vergari

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 Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-05 Minh-Ngoc Tran , David J. Nott , Robert Kohn

Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) and fiber tractography are the only methods to measure the structure of the white matter in the living human brain. The diffusion signal has been modelled as the combined contribution from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-09-29 Charles Zheng , Franco Pestilli , Ariel Rokem

We introduce a methodology for robust Bayesian estimation with robust divergence (e.g., density power divergence or {\gamma}-divergence), indexed by a single tuning parameter. It is well known that the posterior density induced by robust…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-04 Shouto Yonekura , Shonosuke Sugasawa

In many scientific applications, uncertainty of estimates from an earlier (upstream) analysis needs to be propagated in subsequent (downstream) Bayesian analysis, without feedback. Cutting feedback methods, also termed cut-Bayes, achieve…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-28 Jiafang Song , Sandipan Pramanik , Abhirup Datta

Background: Heritability is a central measure in genetics quantifying how much of the variability observed in a trait is attributable to genetic differences. Existing methods for estimating heritability are most often based on random-effect…

Applications · Statistics 2022-08-26 The Tien Mai , Paul Turner , Jukka Corander

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Yuda Shao , Shan Yu , Tianshu Feng

Explainable boosting machines (EBMs) are popular "glass-box" models that learn a set of univariate functions using boosting trees. These achieve explainability through visualizations of each feature's effect. However, unlike linear model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Haimo Fang , Kevin Tan , Jonathan Pipping-Gamon , Giles Hooker

We present a unified probabilistic gradient boosting framework for regression tasks that models and predicts the entire conditional distribution of a univariate response variable as a function of covariates. Our likelihood-based approach…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-05 Alexander März , Thomas Kneib

Boosting is a popular way to derive powerful learners from simpler hypothesis classes. Following previous work (Mason et al., 1999; Friedman, 2000) on general boosting frameworks, we analyze gradient-based descent algorithms for boosting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-15 Alexander Grubb , J. Andrew Bagnell

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Mingzhang Yin , Y. X. Rachel Wang , Purnamrita Sarkar

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

With the advancements of computer architectures, the use of computational models proliferates to solve complex problems in many scientific applications such as nuclear physics and climate research. However, the potential of such models is…

Computation · Statistics 2021-07-05 Vojtech Kejzlar , Tapabrata Maiti