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Semi-supervised variational autoencoders (VAEs) have obtained strong results, but have also encountered the challenge that good ELBO values do not always imply accurate inference results. In this paper, we investigate and propose two causes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Hao-Zhe Feng , Kezhi Kong , Minghao Chen , Tianye Zhang , Minfeng Zhu , Wei Chen

This paper introduces a modified variational autoencoder (VAEs) that contains an additional neural network branch. The resulting branched VAE (BVAE) contributes a classification component based on the class labels to the total loss and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Ahmed Salah , David Yevick

In practical regression applications, multiple covariates are often measured, but not all may be associated with the response variable. Identifying and including only the relevant covariates in the model is crucial for improving prediction…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Ana Carolina da Cruz , Camila P. E. de Souza , Pedro H. T. O. Sousa

Gradient-based optimization is the foundation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Even when the mechanism being optimized is unknown or not differentiable, optimization using high-variance or biased gradient estimates is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Will Grathwohl , Dami Choi , Yuhuai Wu , Geoffrey Roeder , David Duvenaud

While backpropagation--reverse-mode automatic differentiation--has been extraordinarily successful in deep learning, it requires two passes (forward and backward) through the neural network and the storage of intermediate activations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Daniel Wang , Evan Markou , Dylan Campbell

The deployment of machine learning classifiers in high-stakes domains requires well-calibrated confidence scores for model predictions. In this paper we introduce the notion of variable-based calibration to characterize calibration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Markelle Kelly , Padhraic Smyth

Gradient estimation is often necessary for fitting generative models with discrete latent variables, in contexts such as reinforcement learning and variational autoencoder (VAE) training. The DisARM estimator (Yin et al. 2020; Dong, Mnih,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-15 Russell Z. Kunes , Mingzhang Yin , Max Land , Doron Haviv , Dana Pe'er , Simon Tavaré

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one class of generative probabilistic latent-variable models designed for inference based on known data. We develop three variations on VAEs by introducing a second parameterized encoder/decoder pair and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 R. I. Cukier

Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradient estimates. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Artyom Gadetsky , Kirill Struminsky , Christopher Robinson , Novi Quadrianto , Dmitry Vetrov

We propose an analytical solution for approximating the gradient of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) in variational inference problems where the statistical model is a Bayesian network consisting of observations drawn from a mixture of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Roumen Nikolaev Popov

A new method for learning variational autoencoders (VAEs) is developed, based on Stein variational gradient descent. A key advantage of this approach is that one need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-20 Yunchen Pu , Zhe Gan , Ricardo Henao , Chunyuan Li , Shaobo Han , Lawrence Carin

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one class of generative probabilistic latent-variable models designed for inference based on known data. They balance reconstruction and regularizer terms. A variational approximation produces an evidence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-13 Robert I. Cukier

Machine learning models are increasingly being utilized across various fields and tasks due to their outstanding performance and strong generalization capabilities. Nonetheless, their success hinges on the availability of large volumes of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Shreen Gul , Mohamed Elmahallawy , Sanjay Madria , Ardhendu Tripathy

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Variational inequalities have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning as a flexible paradigm for models that go beyond ordinary loss function minimization (such as generative adversarial networks and related deep…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-12 Yu-Guan Hsieh , Franck Iutzeler , Jérôme Malick , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kian Ming A. Chai , Edwin V. Bonilla

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-29 Robert Bamler , Cheng Zhang , Manfred Opper , Stephan Mandt

We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-21 Ali Unlu , Laurence Aitchison

We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-11 Ali Unlu , Laurence Aitchison