Related papers: CATVI: Conditional and Adaptively Truncated Variat…

Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

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…

The spatial error model (SEM) is a type of simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) model for analysing spatially correlated data. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most widely used Bayesian methods for estimating SEM, but it has…

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…

Variational inference, as an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, has played a transformative role in enabling scalable computation for complex Bayesian models. Nevertheless, existing approaches often depend on either rigid…

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

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…

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…

Standard Bayesian approaches for linear time-invariant (LTI) system identification are hindered by parameter non-identifiability; the resulting complex, multi-modal posteriors make inference inefficient and impractical. We solve this…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular generative model, but one in which conditional inference can be challenging. If the decomposition into query and evidence variables is fixed, conditional VAEs provide an attractive solution. To…

Estimating an individual's counterfactual outcomes under interventions is a challenging task for traditional causal inference and supervised learning approaches when the outcome is high-dimensional (e.g. gene expressions, facial images) and…

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…

A variety of lifted inference algorithms, which exploit model symmetry to reduce computational cost, have been proposed to render inference tractable in probabilistic relational models. Most existing lifted inference algorithms operate only…

Gradient-based Monte Carlo sampling algorithms, like Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, are important methods for Bayesian inference. In large-scale settings, full-gradients are not affordable and thus stochastic gradients…

Gaussian variational approximations are widely used for summarizing posterior distributions in Bayesian models, especially in high-dimensional settings. However, a drawback of such approximations is the inability to capture skewness or more…

The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the…

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…

Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…