Related papers: There and Back Again: Unraveling the Variational A…

We introduce a stochastic variational inference procedure for training scalable Gaussian process (GP) models whose per-iteration complexity is independent of both the number of training points, $n$, and the number basis functions used in…

In recent years, the field of machine learning has made phenomenal progress in the pursuit of simulating real-world data generation processes. One notable example of such success is the variational autoencoder (VAE). In this work, with a…

We study exact constant collapse in variational autoencoders: the deterministic encoder mean becomes independent of the input. The prior remains the standard Gaussian. Before VAE training, we select a fixed teacher posterior from a…

The vector quantization is a widely used method to map continuous representation to discrete space and has important application in tokenization for generative mode, bottlenecking information and many other tasks in machine learning. Vector…

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;…

We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…

We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…

We study a variant of the variational autoencoder model (VAE) with a Gaussian mixture as a prior distribution, with the goal of performing unsupervised clustering through deep generative models. We observe that the known problem of…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) rely on amortized variational inference to enable efficient posterior approximation, but this efficiency comes at the cost of a shared parametrization, giving rise to the amortization gap. We propose the…

We introduce a variational reasoning framework for language models that treats thinking traces as latent variables and optimizes them through variational inference. Starting from the evidence lower bound (ELBO), we extend it to a…

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is an established generative model but is notorious for its blurriness. In this work, we investigate the blurry output problem of VAE and resolve it, exploiting the variance of Gaussian decoder and $\beta$ of…

Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…

Inspired by recent developments in learning smoothed densities with empirical Bayes, we study variational autoencoders with a decoder that is tailored for the random variable $Y=X+N(0,\sigma^2 I_d)$. A notion of smoothed variational…

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…

A new maximum likelihood estimation approach for blind channel equalization, using variational autoencoders (VAEs), is introduced. Significant and consistent improvements in the error rate of the reconstructed symbols, compared to constant…

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…

Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator…

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…

We consider the problem of learning Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), i.e., a type of deep generative model, from data with missing values. Such data is omnipresent in real-world applications of machine learning because complete data is…

Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) seeks experiments that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) in model parameters. Directly estimating the EIG using nested Monte Carlo is computationally expensive and requires an explicit…