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Related papers: Stochastic Variational Inference via Upper Bound

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Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED) seeks to maximize the expected information gain (EIG) of experiments. This requires a likelihood estimate, which in many settings is intractable. Simulation-based inference (SBI) provides powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Samuel Klein , Willie Neiswanger , Daniel Ratner , Michael Kagan , Sean Gasiorowski

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-29 Amar Shah , David A. Knowles , Zoubin Ghahramani

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used method for data-driven optimization that generally relies on zeroth-order data of objective function to construct probabilistic surrogate models. These surrogates guide the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Georgios Makrygiorgos , Joshua Hang Sai Ip , Ali Mesbah

Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-03 Dingbo Wu , Fangzheng Xie

Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

Binary Neural Networks (BiNNs), which employ single-bit precision weights, have emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory usage and power consumption while maintaining competitive performance in large-scale systems. However, training…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-18 Luca Nepote , Alix Lhéritier , Nicolas Bondoux , Marios Kountouris , Maurizio Filippone

Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hippolyte Labarrière , Cesare Molinari , Silvia Villa , Lorenzo Rosasco

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Sebastian W. Ober

For stochastic process models, parameter inference is often severely bottlenecked by computationally expensive likelihood functions. Simulation-based inference (SBI) bypasses this restriction by constructing amortized surrogate likelihoods,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Alexander Shen , Mikael Kuusela

Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Parth Paritosh , Nikolay Atanasov , Sonia Martinez

Optimization is becoming increasingly common in scientific and engineering domains. Oftentimes, these problems involve various levels of stochasticity or uncertainty in generating proposed solutions. Therefore, optimization in these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-05 Peter D. Tonner , Daniel V. Samarov , A. Gilad Kusne

The Importance-Weighted Evidence Lower Bound (IW-ELBO) has emerged as an effective objective for variational inference (VI), tightening the standard ELBO and mitigating the mode-seeking behaviour. However, optimizing the IW-ELBO in…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-05 Peiwen Jiang , Takuo Matsubara , Minh-Ngoc Tran

Bayesian deep learning plays an important role especially for its ability evaluating epistemic uncertainty (EU). Due to computational complexity issues, approximation methods such as variational inference (VI) have been used in practice to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Futoshi Futami , Tomoharu Iwata , Naonori Ueda , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Adji B. Dieng , Dustin Tran , Rajesh Ranganath , John Paisley , David M. Blei

A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Victor Gallego , David Rios Insua

We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-19 Dmitry Molchanov , Valery Kharitonov , Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…

We exploit the observation that stochastic variational inference (SVI) is a form of annealing and present a modified SVI approach -- applicable to both large and small datasets -- that allows the amount of annealing done by SVI to be tuned.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 John Paisley , Ghazal Fazelnia , Brian Barr

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular paradigm for global optimization of expensive black-box functions, but there are many domains where the function is not completely a black-box. The data may have some known structure (e.g. symmetries)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Samuel Kim , Peter Y. Lu , Charlotte Loh , Jamie Smith , Jasper Snoek , Marin Soljačić