Related papers: f-Divergence Variational Inference
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
From a variational perspective, many statistical learning criteria involve seeking a distribution that balances empirical risk and regularization. In this paper, we broaden this perspective by introducing a new general class of variational…
Continual learning in neural networks aims to learn new tasks without forgetting old tasks. Sequential function-space variational inference (SFSVI) uses a Gaussian variational distribution to approximate the distribution of the outputs of…
We present a general method for deriving collapsed variational inference algo- rithms for probabilistic models in the conjugate exponential family. Our method unifies many existing approaches to collapsed variational inference. Our…
The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…
Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…
Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would…
We develop a Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for Bayesian Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regression with linear weight parameterizations. The model separates impact coeffcients from weighting function parameters…
The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
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…
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…
Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…
Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…
Variational inference with {\alpha}-divergences has been widely used in modern probabilistic machine learning. Compared to Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, a major advantage of using {\alpha}-divergences (with positive {\alpha} values) is…
Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
Normalising-flow variational inference (VI) can approximate complex posteriors, yet single-flow models often behave inconsistently across qualitatively different distributions. We propose Adaptive Mixture Flow Variational Inference…
Continuously-indexed flows (CIFs) have recently achieved improvements over baseline normalizing flows on a variety of density estimation tasks. CIFs do not possess a closed-form marginal density, and so, unlike standard flows, cannot be…