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Building on the recent trend of new deep generative models known as Normalizing Flows (NF), simulation-based inference (SBI) algorithms can now efficiently accommodate arbitrary complex and high-dimensional data distributions. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-28 Julia Linhart , Alexandre Gramfort , Pedro L. C. Rodrigues

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Yingzhi Xia , Qifeng Liao , Jinglai Li

We present Causal Posterior Estimation (CPE), a novel method for Bayesian inference in simulator models, i.e., models where the evaluation of the likelihood function is intractable or too computationally expensive, but where one can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Simon Dirmeier , Antonietta Mira

Bayesian inference with computationally expensive likelihood evaluations remains a significant challenge in many scientific domains. We propose normalizing flow regression (NFR), a novel offline inference method for approximating posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-17 Chengkun Li , Bobby Huggins , Petrus Mikkola , Luigi Acerbi

The inferential model (IM) framework provides valid prior-free probabilistic inference by focusing on predicting unobserved auxiliary variables. But, efficient IM-based inference can be challenging when the auxiliary variable is of higher…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-01-20 Ryan Martin , Chuanhai Liu

Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Bohan Wu , David Blei

In the past few years, deep generative models, such as generative adversarial networks \autocite{GAN}, variational autoencoders \autocite{vaepaper}, and their variants, have seen wide adoption for the task of modelling complex data…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-02 Guilherme G. P. Freitas Pires , Mário A. T. Figueiredo

Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

Classifier-free guidance is a key component for enhancing the performance of conditional generative models across diverse tasks. While it has previously demonstrated remarkable improvements for the sample quality, it has only been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Qinqing Zheng , Matt Le , Neta Shaul , Yaron Lipman , Aditya Grover , Ricky T. Q. Chen

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

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

This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically used to model distributions over continuous spaces, and generative flow networks (GFlowNets), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Nikolay Malkin , Salem Lahlou , Tristan Deleu , Xu Ji , Edward Hu , Katie Everett , Dinghuai Zhang , Yoshua Bengio

Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Farzaneh Mahdisoltani

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models widely used for learning interpretable latent spaces, quantifying uncertainty, and compressing data for downstream generative tasks. VAEs typically rely on diagonal Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Peter Sorrenson , Lukas Lührs , Hans Olischläger , Ullrich Köthe

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

Normalizing flows model complex probability distributions by combining a base distribution with a series of bijective neural networks. State-of-the-art architectures rely on coupling and autoregressive transformations to lift up invertible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Antoine Wehenkel , Gilles Louppe

We present a novel particle flow for sampling called kernel variational inference flow (KVIF). KVIF do not require the explicit formula of the target distribution which is usually unknown in filtering problem. Therefore, it can be applied…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Weiye Gan , Zhijun Zeng , Junqing Chen , Zuoqiang Shi

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

Amortized inference promises fast test-time Bayesian inference, but existing methods are inherently tied to fixed models. Extending amortization to unseen models typically requires retraining or costly test-time finetuning. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Joohwan Ko , Justin Domke