Related papers: MCMC-Interactive Variational Inference

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…

In engineering examples, one often encounters the need to sample from unnormalized distributions with complex shapes that may also be implicitly defined through a physical or numerical simulation model, making it computationally expensive…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…

In many scientific applications, uncertainty of estimates from an earlier (upstream) analysis needs to be propagated in subsequent (downstream) Bayesian analysis, without feedback. Cutting feedback methods, also termed cut-Bayes, achieve…

Performing numerical integration when the integrand itself cannot be evaluated point-wise is a challenging task that arises in statistical analysis, notably in Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. Markov…

Two standard models for probabilistic systems are Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). Classic objectives for such probabilistic models for control and planning problems are reachability and stochastic shortest path.…

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 method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

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…

Most successful applications of deep learning involve similar training and test conditions. However, tasks such as biological sequence design involve searching for sequences that improve desirable properties beyond previously known values,…

The multivariate coefficient of variation (MCV) is an attractive and easy-to-interpret effect size for the dispersion in multivariate data. Recently, the first inference methods for the MCV were proposed by Ditzhaus and Smaga (2022) for…

Approximate inference algorithm is one of the fundamental research fields in machine learning. The two dominant theoretical inference frameworks in machine learning are variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are two main approximate approaches for learning deep generative models by maximizing marginal likelihood. In this paper, we propose using annealed importance sampling for…

Cyclical MCMC is a novel MCMC framework recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2019) to address the challenge posed by high-dimensional multimodal posterior distributions like those arising in deep learning. The algorithm works by generating a…

Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…

In this paper we build on previous work which uses inferences techniques, in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, to solve parameterized control problems. We propose a number of modifications in order to make this approach…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has been the de facto technique for sampling and inference of large graphs such as online social networks. At the heart of MCMC lies the ability to construct an ergodic Markov chain that attains any given…

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…

Markov jump processes (or continuous-time Markov chains) are a simple and important class of continuous-time dynamical systems. In this paper, we tackle the problem of simulating from the posterior distribution over paths in these models,…