Related papers: Amortized Monte Carlo Integration
In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…
The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…
Among Monte Carlo techniques, the importance sampling requires fine tuning of a proposal distribution, which is now fluently resolved through iterative schemes. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) of Cornuet et al. (2012)…
Naive approaches to amortized inference in probabilistic programs with unbounded loops can produce estimators with infinite variance. This is particularly true of importance sampling inference in programs that explicitly include rejection…
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:…
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…
Modern learning systems increasingly rely on amortized learning - the idea of reusing computation or inductive biases shared across tasks to enable rapid generalization to novel problems. This principle spans a range of approaches,…
We propose a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method to efficiently and accurately compute cut-Bayesian posterior quantities of interest, variations of standard Bayesian approaches constructed primarily to account for model misspecification. We…
Bayesian reasoning in linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) is challenging and often requires advanced sampling techniques like Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). A common approach is to write the model in a probabilistic programming language…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is computationally intensive for complex model simulators. To exploit expensive simulations, data-resampling via bootstrapping can be employed to obtain many artificial datasets at little cost.…
In Bayesian inference, we are usually interested in the numerical approximation of integrals that are posterior expectations or marginal likelihoods (a.k.a., Bayesian evidence). In this paper, we focus on the computation of the posterior…
Variational inference methods have been shown to lead to significant improvements in the computational efficiency of approximate Bayesian inference in mixed multinomial logit models when compared to standard Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
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…
Bayesian optimization is a sample-efficient approach to solving global optimization problems. Along with a surrogate model, this approach relies on theoretically motivated value heuristics (acquisition functions) to guide the search…
Bayesian parameter inference for complex stochastic simulators is challenging due to intractable likelihood functions. Existing simulation-based inference methods often require large number of simulations and become costly to use in…
ABC (approximate Bayesian computation) is a general approach for dealing with models with an intractable likelihood. In this work, we derive ABC algorithms based on QMC (quasi- Monte Carlo) sequences. We show that the resulting ABC…
Monte Carlo methods are widely used for approximating complicated, multidimensional integrals for Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) is an important class of Monte Carlo methods, which utilizes a population of proposals to…
Bayesian inference promises to ground and improve the performance of deep neural networks. It promises to be robust to overfitting, to simplify the training procedure and the space of hyperparameters, and to provide a calibrated measure of…
A vital stage in the mathematical modelling of real-world systems is to calibrate a model's parameters to observed data. Likelihood-free parameter inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computation, build Monte Carlo samples of the…
Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…