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Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-03 Alp Kucukelbir , Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , Andrew Gelman , David M. Blei

In this paper, we study the approximation and estimation of $s$-concave densities via R\'enyi divergence. We first show that the approximation of a probability measure $Q$ by an $s$-concave densities exists and is unique via the procedure…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-10-23 Qiyang Han , Jon A. Wellner

Sampling and Variational Inference (VI) are two large families of methods for approximate inference that have complementary strengths. Sampling methods excel at approximating arbitrary probability distributions, but can be inefficient. VI…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-07 Richard D. Lange , Ari Benjamin , Ralf M. Haefner , Xaq Pitkow

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-16 Jen Ning Lim , Adam M. Johansen

We propose a new family of regularized R\'enyi divergences parametrized not only by the order $\alpha$ but also by a variational function space. These new objects are defined by taking the infimal convolution of the standard R\'enyi…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-16 Jeremiah Birrell , Yannis Pantazis , Paul Dupuis , Markos A. Katsoulakis , Luc Rey-Bellet

We introduce a new shrinkage variable selection operator for linear models which we term the \emph{adaptive ridge selector} (ARiS). This approach is inspired by the \emph{relevance vector machine} (RVM), which uses a Bayesian hierarchical…

Methodology · Statistics 2008-05-28 Artin Armagan , Russell Zaretzki

Rejection Sampling is a fundamental Monte-Carlo method. It is used to sample from distributions admitting a probability density function which can be evaluated exactly at any given point, albeit at a high computational cost. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-23 Juliette Achdou , Joseph C. Lam , Alexandra Carpentier , Gilles Blanchard

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL) has recently gained significant attention as a principled approach that addresses discrepancies between training and testing environments. To balance robustness, conservatism, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhenghao Li , Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

This paper focuses on $\alpha$-divergence minimisation methods for Variational Inference. More precisely, we are interested in algorithms optimising the mixture weights of any given mixture model, without any information on the underlying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-10 Kamélia Daudel , Randal Douc

We extend the Rate-Distortion-Perception (RDP) framework to the R\'enyi information-theoretic regime, utilizing Sibson's $\alpha$-mutual information to characterize the fundamental limits under distortion and perception constraints. For…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiahui Wei , Marios Kountouris

In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-11 Jinhua Lyu , Tianmin Yu , Ying Ma , Naichen Shi

Companion paper [118] developed a powerful \emph{Random duality theory} (RDT) based analytical program to statistically characterize performance of \emph{descending} phase retrieval algorithms (dPR) (these include all variants of gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Mihailo Stojnic

Real-life data are often non-IID due to complex distributions and interactions, and the sensitivity to the distribution of samples can differ among learning models. Accordingly, a key question for any supervised or unsupervised model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Zhilin Zhao , Longbing Cao

Selective prediction, where a model has the option to abstain from making a decision, is crucial for machine learning applications in which mistakes are costly. In this work, we focus on distributional regression and introduce a framework…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-04-01 Ahmed Zaoui , Clément Dombry

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Luca Ghafourpour , Sinho Chewi , Alessio Figalli , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

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

When a statistical model $\{P_{\theta} : \theta \in \Theta\}$ lacks analytically tractable likelihoods, parametric statistical inference based on data generated from an unknown underlying distribution $P$ can still be performed as long as…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Peter Matthew Jacobs , Lekha Patel , Anirban Bhattacharya , Debdeep Pati

This study presents a new image super-resolution (SR) technique based on diffusion inversion, aiming at harnessing the rich image priors encapsulated in large pre-trained diffusion models to improve SR performance. We design a Partial noise…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Zongsheng Yue , Kang Liao , Chen Change Loy

Rejection sampling is a common tool for low dimensional problems ($d \leq 2$), often touted as an "easy" way to obtain valid samples from a distribution $f(\cdot)$ of interest. In practice it is non-trivial to apply, often requiring…

Computation · Statistics 2023-10-03 Edward Raff , Mark McLean , James Holt

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) facilitates efficient inference by distilling multi-step diffusion models into few-step variants. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a vital tool for aligning generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Dengyang Jiang , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Qilong Wu , Liuzhuozheng Li , Hengzhuang Li , Xin Jin , David Liu , Changsheng Lu , Zhen Li , Bo Zhang , Mengmeng Wang , Steven Hoi , Peng Gao , Harry Yang