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Related papers: Stochastic Variational Inference via Upper Bound

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Bayesian optimisation (BO) has been a successful approach to optimise functions which are expensive to evaluate and whose observations are noisy. Classical BO algorithms, however, do not account for errors about the location where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Rafael Oliveira , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 David M. Blei , Alp Kucukelbir , Jon D. McAuliffe

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-09-01 Liang Yan , Tao Zhou

Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions by combining prior knowledge with ongoing function evaluations. BO constructs a probabilistic surrogate model of the objective function given the covariates,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-26 Roi Naveiro , Becky Tang

The stochastic variational inference (SVI) paradigm, which combines variational inference, natural gradients, and stochastic updates, was recently proposed for large-scale data analysis in conjugate Bayesian models and demonstrated to be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-05 Rishit Sheth , Roni Khardon

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-07 Tom Rainforth , Adam R. Kosiorek , Tuan Anh Le , Chris J. Maddison , Maximilian Igl , Frank Wood , Yee Whye Teh

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-16 Saad Mohamad , Abdelhamid Bouchachia , Moamar Sayed-Mouchaweh

Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been…

Stein variational inference (SVI) is a sample-based approximate Bayesian inference technique that generates a sample set by jointly optimizing the samples' locations to minimize an information-theoretic measure of discrepancy with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Liam Pavlovic , David M. Rosen

A body of work has been done to automate machine learning algorithm to highlight the importance of model choice. Automating the process of choosing the best forecasting model and its corresponding parameters can result to improve a wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-02 Nadhir Hassen , Irina Rish

Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Shengyang Sun , Guodong Zhang , Jiaxin Shi , Roger Grosse

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-29 Alexander Moreno , Tameem Adel , Edward Meeds , James M. Rehg , Max Welling

We introduce a fully stochastic gradient based approach to Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED). Our approach utilizes variational lower bounds on the expected information gain (EIG) of an experiment that can be simultaneously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-28 Adam Foster , Martin Jankowiak , Matthew O'Meara , Yee Whye Teh , Tom Rainforth

We consider derivative-free black-box global optimization of expensive noisy functions, when most of the randomness in the objective is produced by a few influential scalar random inputs. We present a new Bayesian global optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-23 Saul Toscano-Palmerin , Peter I. Frazier

Variational Inference (VI) provides a scalable framework for Bayesian inference by optimizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), but convergence analysis remains challenging due to the objective's non-convexity and non-smoothness in Euclidean…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-20 Sushil Bohara , Amedeo Roberto Esposito

Bayesian optimisation (BO) uses probabilistic surrogate models - usually Gaussian processes (GPs) - for the optimisation of expensive black-box functions. At each BO iteration, the GP hyperparameters are fit to previously-evaluated data by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-04 George De Ath , Richard Everson , Jonathan Fieldsend

Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Hamza Anwar , Quanyan Zhu

We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Tim Reichelt , Luke Ong , Tom Rainforth