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Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jens Sjölund

We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Yun Yang , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya

Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-16 Rajesh Ranganath , Jaan Altosaar , Dustin Tran , David M. Blei

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental concept in information theory that quantifies the discrepancy between two probability distributions. In the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it serves as a central regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Andrés Muñoz , Rodrigo Ramele

In a variety of applications it is important to extract information from a probability measure $\mu$ on an infinite dimensional space. Examples include the Bayesian approach to inverse problems and possibly conditioned) continuous time…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-06-02 Frank Pinski , Gideon Simpson , Andrew Stuart , Hendrik Weber

Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…

We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) implementation of block-sparse Bayesian learning (BSBL) to compute proxy probability density functions (PDFs) that approximate the posterior PDFs of the weights and associated hyperparameters in a…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Jakob Möderl , Erik Leitinger , Bernard H. Fleury , Franz Pernkopf , Klaus Witrisal

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Felix Leibfried

Large-scale Gaussian process inference has long faced practical challenges due to time and space complexity that is superlinear in dataset size. While sparse variational Gaussian process models are capable of learning from large-scale data,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Ching-An Cheng , Byron Boots

Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Parth Paritosh , Nikolay Atanasov , Sonia Martinez

The proliferation of automated inference algorithms in Bayesian statistics has provided practitioners newfound access to fast, reproducible data analysis and powerful statistical models. Designing automated methods that are also both…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Trevor Campbell , Boyan Beronov

Effective uncertainty quantification is important for training modern predictive models with limited data, enhancing both accuracy and robustness. While Bayesian methods are effective for this purpose, they can be challenging to scale. When…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jasmeet Kaur

We discuss a Bayesian methodology for the solution of the inverse problem underlying the determination of parton distribution functions (PDFs). In our approach, Gaussian Processes (GPs) are used to model the PDF prior, while Bayes theorem…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2024-07-03 Alessandro Candido , Luigi Del Debbio , Tommaso Giani , Giacomo Petrillo

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-12 Nikolaos Gianniotis , Christoph Schnörr , Christian Molkenthin , Sanjay Singh Bora

Logistic regression involving high-dimensional covariates is a practically important problem. Often the goal is variable selection, i.e., determining which few of the many covariates are associated with the binary response. Unfortunately,…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-18 Yiqi Tang , Ryan Martin

Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…

Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Simone Rossi , Sebastien Marmin , Maurizio Filippone

Bayesian neural networks (BNN) promise to combine the predictive performance of neural networks with principled uncertainty modeling important for safety-critical systems and decision making. However, posterior uncertainty estimates depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tristan Cinquin , Robert Bamler