Related papers: Decision-Making with Auto-Encoding Variational Bay…

The Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) is a quantity that plays a key role in variational inference. It can also be used as a criterion in model selection. However, though extremely popular in practice in the variational Bayes community, there has…

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.…

Does a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) consistently encode typical samples generated from its decoder? This paper shows that the perhaps surprising answer to this question is `No'; a (nominally trained) VAE does not necessarily amortize…

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful framework for learning probabilistic latent variable generative models. However, typical assumptions on the approximate posterior distribution of the encoder and/or the prior, seriously…

In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…

The surrogate loss of variational autoencoders (VAEs) poses various challenges to their training, inducing the imbalance between task fitting and representation inference. To avert this, the existing strategies for VAEs focus on adjusting…

We address the computational efficiency in solving the A-optimal Bayesian design of experiments problems for which the observational map is based on partial differential equations and, consequently, is computationally expensive to evaluate.…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact…

Recent methods for knowledge grounded dialogs generate responses by incorporating information from an external textual document. These methods do not require the exact document to be known during training and rely on the use of a retrieval…

This work introduces a new method for selecting the number of components in finite mixture models (FMMs) using variational Bayes, inspired by the large-sample properties of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) derived from mean-field (MF)…

We discuss Bayesian model uncertainty analysis and forecasting in sequential dynamic modeling of multivariate time series. The perspective is that of a decision-maker with a specific forecasting objective that guides thinking about relevant…

Non-linear hierarchical models are commonly used in many disciplines. However, inference in the presence of non-nested effects and on large datasets is challenging and computationally burdensome. This paper provides two contributions to…

Variational Bayes (VB) has been used to facilitate the calculation of the posterior distribution in the context of Bayesian inference of the parameters of nonlinear models from data. Previously an analytical formulation of VB has been…

Performing exact posterior inference in complex generative models is often difficult or impossible due to an expensive to evaluate or intractable likelihood function. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is an inference framework that…

Model comparison is the cornerstone of theoretical progress in psychological research. Common practice overwhelmingly relies on tools that evaluate competing models by balancing in-sample descriptive adequacy against model flexibility, with…

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…

In Bayesian analysis, the posterior follows from the data and a choice of a prior and a likelihood. One hopes that the posterior is robust to reasonable variation in the choice of prior and likelihood, since this choice is made by the…

Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Variational Bayes (VB) has shown itself to be a powerful approximation method in many application areas. This paper describes some diagnostics methods which can assess how well the VB approximates the true posterior, particularly with…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…