Related papers: Stochastic Variational Inference via Upper Bound

When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is both a powerful language model and an effective representation learning framework. In practice, however, VAEs are trained with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) as a surrogate…

Several variational bounds involving importance weighting ideas generalize the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) for marginal likelihood optimization, such as the Importance-weighted Auto-Encoder (IWAE), Variational R\'enyi (VR) and VR-IWAE…

Research on Symbolic Probabilistic Inference (SPI) [2, 3] has provided an algorithm for resolving general queries in Bayesian networks. SPI applies the concept of dependency directed backward search to probabilistic inference, and is…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an effective technique for black-box optimization. However, its applicability is typically limited to moderate-budget problems due to the cubic complexity of fitting the Gaussian process (GP) surrogate model.…

Stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) has been integrated into many machine learning paradigms recently, including hyperparameter optimization, meta learning, and reinforcement learning. Along with the wide range of applications, there have…

Variational logistic regression is a popular method for approximate Bayesian inference seeing wide-spread use in many areas of machine learning including: Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning and multi-instance learning to name a…

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a promising Bayesian inference framework that alleviates the need for analytic likelihoods to estimate posterior distributions. Recent advances using neural density estimators in SBI algorithms have…

Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…

Stochastic variational inference is an established way to carry out approximate Bayesian inference for deep models. While there have been effective proposals for good initializations for loss minimization in deep learning, far less…

Despite the dominant role of deep models in machine learning, limitations persist, including overconfident predictions, susceptibility to adversarial attacks, and underestimation of variability in predictions. The Bayesian paradigm provides…

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…

In this paper, we develop a stochastic set-valued optimization (SVO) framework tailored for robust machine learning. In the SVO setting, each decision variable is mapped to a set of objective values, and optimality is defined via set…

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…

Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…

Preferential Bayesian Optimization (PBO) aims to find a decision-maker's most preferred solution in as few pairwise comparisons as possible. Existing approaches rely on Gaussian Process (GP) surrogates, which provide strong performance but…

The surrogate-assisted optimization algorithm is a promising approach for solving expensive multi-objective optimization problems. However, most existing surrogate-assisted multi-objective optimization algorithms have three main drawbacks:…

We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…