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Bayesian posterior inference is prevalent in various machine learning problems. Variational inference provides one way to approximate the posterior distribution, however its expressive power is limited and so is the accuracy of resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Guoqing Zheng , Yiming Yang , Jaime Carbonell

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

Ising models originated in statistical physics and are widely used in modeling spatial data and computer vision problems. However, statistical inference of this model remains challenging due to intractable nature of the normalizing constant…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-06 Minwoo Kim , Shrijita Bhattacharya , Tapabrata Maiti

Current methods for learning graphical models with latent variables and a fixed structure estimate optimal values for the model parameters. Whereas this approach usually produces overfitting and suboptimal generalization performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Hagai Attias

Many modern experiments, such as microarray gene expression and genome-wide association studies, present the problem of estimating a large number of parallel effects. Bayesian inference is a popular approach for analyzing such data by…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-26 J G Liao , Arthur Berg , Timothy L McMurry

Gaussian distributions are widely used in Bayesian variational inference to approximate intractable posterior densities, but the ability to accommodate skewness can improve approximation accuracy significantly, when data or prior…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-05 Linda S. L. Tan , Aoxiang Chen

We propose a general method to carry out a valid Bayesian analysis of a finite-dimensional `targeted' parameter in the presence of a finite-dimensional nuisance parameter. We apply our methods to causal inference based on estimating…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Magid Sabbagh , David A. Stephens

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-15 Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Shakir Mohamed

In this thesis, we disentangle the generalized Gauss-Newton and approximate inference for Bayesian deep learning. The generalized Gauss-Newton method is an optimization method that is used in several popular Bayesian deep learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-24 Alexander Immer

In this work we explore a straightforward variational Bayes scheme for Recurrent Neural Networks. Firstly, we show that a simple adaptation of truncated backpropagation through time can yield good quality uncertainty estimates and superior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Meire Fortunato , Charles Blundell , Oriol Vinyals

The posterior over Bayesian neural network (BNN) parameters is extremely high-dimensional and non-convex. For computational reasons, researchers approximate this posterior using inexpensive mini-batch methods such as mean-field variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Pavel Izmailov , Sharad Vikram , Matthew D. Hoffman , Andrew Gordon Wilson

The analytic inference, e.g. predictive distribution being in closed form, may be an appealing benefit for machine learning practitioners when they treat wide neural networks as Gaussian process in Bayesian setting. The realistic widths,…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2023-08-01 Chi-Ken Lu

We consider deep neural networks in a Bayesian framework with a prior distribution sampling the network weights at random. Following a recent idea of Agapiou and Castillo (2023), who show that heavy-tailed prior distributions achieve…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-16 Ismaël Castillo , Paul Egels

In high-dimensional Bayesian statistics, various methods have been developed, including prior distributions that induce parameter sparsity to handle many parameters. Yet, these approaches often overlook the rich spectral structure of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-06 Tomoya Wakayama , Masaaki Imaizumi

While Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold the promise of being flexible, well-calibrated statistical models, inference often requires approximations whose consequences are poorly understood. We study the quality of common variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-26 Andrew Y. K. Foong , David R. Burt , Yingzhen Li , Richard E. Turner

Bayesian inference was once a gold standard for learning with neural networks, providing accurate full predictive distributions and well calibrated uncertainty. However, scaling Bayesian inference techniques to deep neural networks is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-18 Pavel Izmailov , Wesley J. Maddox , Polina Kirichenko , Timur Garipov , Dmitry Vetrov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Modern deep learning models generalize remarkably well in-distribution, despite being overparametrized and trained with little to no explicit regularization. Instead, current theory credits implicit regularization imposed by the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jonathan Wenger , Beau Coker , Juraj Marusic , John P. Cunningham

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Lucas Kock , Linda S. L. Tan , Prateek Bansal , David J. Nott

Distribution regression has recently attracted much interest as a generic solution to the problem of supervised learning where labels are available at the group level, rather than at the individual level. Current approaches, however, do not…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-18 Ho Chung Leon Law , Danica J. Sutherland , Dino Sejdinovic , Seth Flaxman

A nonparametric Bayes approach is proposed for the problem of estimating a sparse sequence based on Gaussian random variables. We adopt the popular two-group prior with one component being a point mass at zero, and the other component being…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-31 Yunbo Ouyang , Feng Liang