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Simulation-based inference (SBI) is a method to perform inference on a variety of complex scientific models with challenging inference (inverse) problems. Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design (BOED) aims to efficiently use experimental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-13 Vincent D. Zaballa , Elliot E. Hui

Inference in discrete graphical models with variational methods is difficult because of the inability to re-parameterize gradients of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). Many sampling-based methods have been proposed for estimating these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andy Shih , Stefano Ermon

Simulation-based inference (SBI) provides a powerful framework for inferring posterior distributions of stochastic simulators in a wide range of domains. In many settings, however, the posterior distribution is not the end goal itself --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Mila Gorecki , Jakob H. Macke , Michael Deistler

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

We propose a new class of physics-informed neural networks, called physics-informed Variational Autoencoder (PI-VAE), to solve stochastic differential equations (SDEs) or inverse problems involving SDEs. In these problems the governing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-09 Weiheng Zhong , Hadi Meidani

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

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods tackle complex scientific models with challenging inverse problems. However, SBI models often face a significant hurdle due to their non-differentiable nature, which hampers the use of gradient-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Vincent D. Zaballa , Elliot E. Hui

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic

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

How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Diederik P Kingma , Max Welling

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

Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Minyoung Kim

The growing availability of large and complex datasets has increased interest in temporal stochastic processes that can capture stylized facts such as marginal skewness, non-Gaussian tails, long memory, and even non-Markovian dynamics.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Dan Leonte , Raphaël Huser , Almut E. D. Veraart

We introduce a new variational inference (VI) framework, called energetic variational inference (EVI). It minimizes the VI objective function based on a prescribed energy-dissipation law. Using the EVI framework, we can derive many existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yiwei Wang , Jiuhai Chen , Chun Liu , Lulu Kang

Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Zhennan Wu , Roni Khardon

Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables parameter estimation for complex stochastic models with intractable likelihoods when model simulation is feasible. Neural posterior estimation (NPE) is a popular SBI approach that often achieves…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-23 Ryan P. Kelly , David T. Frazier , David J. Warne , Christopher C. Drovandi

We present a hierarchical, control theory inspired method for variational inference (VI) for neural stochastic differential equations (SDEs). While VI for neural SDEs is a promising avenue for uncertainty-aware reasoning in time-series, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rembert Daems , Manfred Opper , Guillaume Crevecoeur , Tolga Birdal

Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have become very popular techniques to perform inference and learning in latent variable models as they allow us to leverage the rich representational power of neural networks to obtain flexible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Anthony L. Caterini , Arnaud Doucet , Dino Sejdinovic