Related papers: f-Divergence Variational Inference
We develop a parallel variational inference (VI) procedure for use in data-distributed settings, where each machine only has access to a subset of data and runs VI independently, without communicating with other machines. This type of…
We develop a general variational inference method that preserves dependency among the latent variables. Our method uses copulas to augment the families of distributions used in mean-field and structured approximations. Copulas model the…
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…
Inverse problems of partial differential equations are ubiquitous across various scientific disciplines and can be formulated as statistical inference problems using Bayes' theorem. To address large-scale problems, it is crucial to develop…
We propose to perform mean-field variational inference (MFVI) in a rotated coordinate system that reduces correlations between variables. The rotation is determined by principal component analysis (PCA) of a cross-covariance matrix…
Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…
Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…
Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…
We derive a new variational formula for the R\'enyi family of divergences, $R_\alpha(Q\|P)$, between probability measures $Q$ and $P$. Our result generalizes the classical Donsker-Varadhan variational formula for the Kullback-Leibler…
We extend the celebrated Glivenko-Cantelli theorem, sometimes called the fundamental theorem of statistics, from its standard setting of total variation distance to all $f$-divergences. A key obstacle in this endeavor is to define…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…
Approximate inference in high-dimensional, discrete probabilistic models is a central problem in computational statistics and machine learning. This paper describes discrete particle variational inference (DPVI), a new approach that…
Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…
Fairness-aware learning is a novel framework for classification tasks. Like regular empirical risk minimization (ERM), it aims to learn a classifier with a low error rate, and at the same time, for the predictions of the classifier to be…
We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…
We introduce a class of generic spike-and-slab priors for high-dimensional linear regression with grouped variables and present a Coordinate-ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for obtaining an optimal variational Bayes…