Related papers: Markovian Score Climbing: Variational Inference wi…

We propose a general framework using spike-and-slab prior distributions to aid with the development of high-dimensional Bayesian inference. Our framework allows inference with a general quasi-likelihood function. We show that highly…

Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…

Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…

Variational inference has become a widely used method to approximate posteriors in complex latent variables models. However, deriving a variational inference algorithm generally requires significant model-specific analysis, and these…

General state-space models (SSMs) are widely used in statistical machine learning and are among the most classical generative models for sequential time-series data. SSMs, comprising latent Markovian states, can be subjected to variational…

In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method for solving variational inequalities (VI) in the context of Markovian noise. By leveraging Extragradient technique, we can productively solve VI optimization problems characterized by…

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…

Efficiently accessing the information contained in non-linear and high dimensional probability distributions remains a core challenge in modern statistics. Traditionally, estimators that go beyond point estimates are either categorized as…

Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…

Bayesian inference methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) typically require repeated computations of the likelihood function, but in some scenarios this is infeasible and alternative methods are needed. Simulation-based inference…

As a technique that can compactly represent complex patterns, machine learning has significant potential for predictive inference. K-fold cross-validation (CV) is the most common approach to ascertaining the likelihood that a machine…

Probabilistic programs with mixed support (both continuous and discrete latent random variables) commonly appear in many probabilistic programming systems (PPSs). However, the existence of the discrete random variables prohibits many basic…

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…

We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Laplace approximation (LA) and variational inference (VI) methods are popular approaches to Bayesian inference, each with trade-offs between computational cost and accuracy. However, a theoretical…

Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Variational inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with…

In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…