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We present a new approach to automatic amortized inference in universal probabilistic programs which improves performance compared to current methods. Our approach is a variation of inference compilation (IC) which leverages deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 William Harvey , Andreas Munk , Atılım Güneş Baydin , Alexander Bergholm , Frank Wood

Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-25 Yoon Kim , Sam Wiseman , Andrew C. Miller , David Sontag , Alexander M. Rush

Bayesian inference usually requires running potentially costly inference procedures separately for every new observation. In contrast, the idea of amortized Bayesian inference is to initially invest computational cost in training an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Manuel Glöckler , Michael Deistler , Jakob H. Macke

Inferring causal structure poses a combinatorial search problem that typically involves evaluating structures with a score or independence test. The resulting search is costly, and designing suitable scores or tests that capture prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Lars Lorch , Scott Sussex , Jonas Rothfuss , Andreas Krause , Bernhard Schölkopf

Amortized simulator-based inference offers a powerful framework for tackling Bayesian inference in computational fields such as engineering or neuroscience, increasingly leveraging modern generative methods like diffusion models to map…

Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are a powerful modeling tool, able to represent any computable probability distribution. Unfortunately, probabilistic program inference is often intractable, and existing PPLs mostly rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-10-19 Daniel Ritchie , Paul Horsfall , Noah D. Goodman

Finite mixtures are a broad class of models useful in scenarios where observed data is generated by multiple distinct processes but without explicit information about the responsible process for each data point. Estimating Bayesian mixture…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 Šimon Kucharský , Paul Christian Bürkner

Diffusion models have emerged as effective distribution estimators in vision, language, and reinforcement learning, but their use as priors in downstream tasks poses an intractable posterior inference problem. This paper studies amortized…

This paper presents an approximate method for performing Bayesian inference in models with conditional independence over a decentralized network of learning agents. The method first employs variational inference on each individual learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-13 Trevor Campbell , Jonathan P. How

Inference for GP models with non-Gaussian noises is computationally expensive when dealing with large datasets. Many recent inference methods approximate the posterior distribution with a simpler distribution defined on a small number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Linfeng Liu , Liping Liu

Probabilistic relational models such as parametric factor graphs enable efficient (lifted) inference by exploiting the indistinguishability of objects. In lifted inference, a representative of indistinguishable objects is used for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Malte Luttermann , Jan Speller , Marcel Gehrke , Tanya Braun , Ralf Möller , Mattis Hartwig

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

Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Andrew Wood , Moshik Hershcovitch , Daniel Waddington , Sarel Cohen , Peter Chin

Sensitivity analyses reveal the influence of various modeling choices on the outcomes of statistical analyses. While theoretically appealing, they are overwhelmingly inefficient for complex Bayesian models. In this work, we propose…

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular model for density estimation and representation learning. Canonically, the variational principle suggests to prefer an expressive inference model so that the variational approximation is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-10 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Shengjia Zhao , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Stefano Ermon

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

We introduce a new class of distributed algorithms for the approximate consensus problem in dynamic rooted networks, which we call amortized averaging algorithms. They are deduced from ordinary averaging algorithms by adding a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Bernadette Charron-Bost , Matthias Függer , Thomas Nowak

In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Charles C. Margossian , David M. Blei

Amortized Bayesian inference (ABI) with neural networks has emerged as a powerful simulation-based approach for estimating complex mechanistic models. However, extending ABI to hierarchical models, a cornerstone of modern Bayesian analysis,…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-04-08 Jonas Arruda , Vikas Pandey , Catherine Sherry , Margarida Barroso , Xavier Intes , Jan Hasenauer , Stefan T. Radev

To infer the parameters of mechanistic models with intractable likelihoods, techniques such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) are increasingly being adopted. One of the main disadvantages of ABC in practical situations, however, is…

Computation · Statistics 2018-08-03 Jonathan U Harrison , Ruth E Baker