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We propose a novel amortized variational inference scheme for an empirical Bayes meta-learning model, where model parameters are treated as latent variables. We learn the prior distribution over model parameters conditioned on limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-31 Ekaterina Iakovleva , Jakob Verbeek , Karteek Alahari

Real-world data is frequently noisy and ambiguous. In crowdsourcing, for example, human annotators may assign conflicting class labels to the same instances. Partial-label learning (PLL) addresses this challenge by training classifiers when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tobias Fuchs , Nadja Klein

Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Joseph Marino , Yisong Yue , Stephan Mandt

Bayesian inference provides a natural way of incorporating prior beliefs and assigning a probability measure to the space of hypotheses. Current solutions rely on iterative routines like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Sarthak Mittal , Niels Leif Bracher , Guillaume Lajoie , Priyank Jaini , Marcus Brubaker

We introduce a simulation-based, amortised Bayesian inference scheme to infer the parameters of random walks. Our approach learns the posterior distribution of the walks' parameters with a likelihood-free method. In the first step a graph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Hippolyte Verdier , François Laurent , Alhassan Cassé , Christian Vestergaard , Jean-Baptiste Masson

We consider amortized Bayesian inference for nonlinear inverse problems in settings where only samples from the joint distribution of parameters and observations are available. Classical methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo require…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Hojjat Kaveh , Ricardo Baptista , Andrew M. Stuart

Simulation-based methods for statistical inference have evolved dramatically over the past 50 years, keeping pace with technological advancements. The field is undergoing a new revolution as it embraces the representational capacity of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-11 Andrew Zammit-Mangion , Matthew Sainsbury-Dale , Raphaël Huser

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a very successful generative model whose key element is the so called amortized inference network, which can perform test time inference using a single feed forward pass. Unfortunately, this comes at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic

Models that employ latent variables to capture structure in observed data lie at the heart of many current unsupervised learning algorithms, but exact maximum-likelihood learning for powerful and flexible latent-variable models is almost…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-18 Li K. Wenliang , Theodore Moskovitz , Heishiro Kanagawa , Maneesh Sahani

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

We consider the problem of state estimation in general state-space models using variational inference. For a generic variational family defined using the same backward decomposition as the actual joint smoothing distribution, we establish…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-02 Mathis Chagneux , Élisabeth Gassiat , Pierre Gloaguen , Sylvain Le Corff

Variational autoencoders employ an amortized inference model to approximate the posterior of latent variables. However, such amortized variational inference faces two challenges: (1) the limited posterior expressiveness of fully-factorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Yookoon Park , Chris Dongjoo Kim , Gunhee Kim

On time-series data, most causal discovery methods fit a new model whenever they encounter samples from a new underlying causal graph. However, these samples often share relevant information which is lost when following this approach.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Sindy Löwe , David Madras , Richard Zemel , Max Welling

We develop amortized population Gibbs (APG) samplers, a class of scalable methods that frames structured variational inference as adaptive importance sampling. APG samplers construct high-dimensional proposals by iterating over updates to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-13 Hao Wu , Heiko Zimmermann , Eli Sennesh , Tuan Anh Le , Jan-Willem van de Meent

Bayesian inference is a powerful tool for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in dynamical systems. However, for nonlinear oscillator networks such as Kuramoto models, widely used to study synchronization phenomena in…

Applications · Statistics 2026-03-24 Emma Hannula , Jana de Wiljes , Matthew T. Moores , Heikki Haario , Lassi Roininen

Learning the kernel parameters for Gaussian processes is often the computational bottleneck in applications such as online learning, Bayesian optimization, or active learning. Amortizing parameter inference over different datasets is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Matthias Bitzer , Mona Meister , Christoph Zimmer

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are commonly used to approximate posterior distributions in models with unknown or computationally intractable likelihoods. Classical ABC methods are based on nearest neighbor type algorithms…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-24 Meili Baragatti , Casenave Céline , Bertrand Cloez , David Métivier , Isabelle Sanchez

Amortized Bayesian inference (ABI) offers fast, scalable approximations to posterior densities by training neural surrogates on data simulated from the statistical model. However, ABI methods are highly sensitive to model misspecification:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-27 Šimon Kucharský , Aayush Mishra , Daniel Habermann , Stefan T. Radev , Paul-Christian Bürkner

In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…

Posterior computation for high-dimensional data with many parameters can be challenging. This article focuses on a new method for approximating posterior distributions of a low- to moderate-dimensional parameter in the presence of a…

Computation · Statistics 2022-04-08 Willem van den Boom , Galen Reeves , David B. Dunson