Related papers: The Thermodynamic Variational Objective
Bayesian Inference and Information Bottleneck are the two most popular objectives for neural networks, but they can be optimised only via a variational lower bound: the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB). In this manuscript we show…
Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…
Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference, and it has been recently applied for representation learning with deep generative models. We develop the variational Gaussian process (VGP), a Bayesian nonparametric…
Diffusion models may be viewed as hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) with two improvements: parameter sharing for the conditional distributions in the generative process and efficient computation of the loss as independent terms…
Many modern deep learning applications require balancing multiple objectives that are often conflicting. Examples include multi-task learning, fairness-aware learning, and the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). This leads to…
Even though Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for semi-supervised learning, the reason why they work remains unclear. In fact, the addition of the unsupervised objective is most often vaguely described as a regularization. The…
Sequential Bayesian inference over predictive functions is a natural framework for continual learning from streams of data. However, applying it to neural networks has proved challenging in practice. Addressing the drawbacks of existing…
Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep…
AI Safety is a major concern in many deep learning applications such as autonomous driving. Given a trained deep learning model, an important natural problem is how to reliably verify the model's prediction. In this paper, we propose a…
We consider the problem of weakly supervised object detection, where the training samples are annotated using only image-level labels that indicate the presence or absence of an object category. In order to model the uncertainty in the…
Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba-…
Dynamic Item Response Models extend the standard Item Response Theory (IRT) to capture temporal dynamics in learner ability. While these models have the potential to allow instructional systems to actively monitor the evolution of learner…
The theory of statistical learning has focused on variational objectives expressed on functions. In this note, we discuss motivations to write similar objectives on measures, in particular to discuss out-of-distribution generalization and…
Unnormalised latent variable models are a broad and flexible class of statistical models. However, learning their parameters from data is intractable, and few estimation techniques are currently available for such models. To increase the…
Generative thermal design for complex geometries is fundamental in many areas of engineering, yet it faces two main challenges: the high computational cost of high-fidelity simulations and the limitations of conventional generative models.…
Continual learning aims to avoid catastrophic forgetting and effectively leverage learned experiences to master new knowledge. Existing gradient projection approaches impose hard constraints on the optimization space for new tasks to…
Segmented models are widely used to describe non-stationary sequential data with discrete change points. Their estimation usually requires solving a mixed discrete-continuous optimization problem, where the segmentation is the discrete part…
This work combines the free energy principle from cognitive neuroscience and the ensuing active inference dynamics with recent advances in variational inference in deep generative models, and evolution strategies to introduce the "deep…
Generative Deep Learning is a powerful tool for modeling of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in the tropics, yet its relationship to traditional theoretical frameworks remains poorly understood. Here we propose a video diffusion model,…
Optimization within a layer of a deep-net has emerged as a new direction for deep-net layer design. However, there are two main challenges when applying these layers to computer vision tasks: (a) which optimization problem within a layer is…