Related papers: Quantized Variational Inference
A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…
Binary Neural Networks (BiNNs), which employ single-bit precision weights, have emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory usage and power consumption while maintaining competitive performance in large-scale systems. However, training…
Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…
While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…
This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth…
Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational distribution.…
Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational free energy (F) in neuroscience (ELBO = -F). While this…
Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…
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.…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
In this paper, we propose CI-VI an efficient and scalable solver for semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI). Our method, first, maps SIVI's evidence lower bound (ELBO) to a form involving a nonlinear functional nesting of expected…
How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
We propose a second-order (Hessian or Hessian-free) based optimization method for variational inference inspired by Gaussian backpropagation, and argue that quasi-Newton optimization can be developed as well. This is accomplished by…
Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference. However, it mainly focuses on the evidence lower bound as variational objective and the development of other measures for variational inference is a promising area of…
We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results…
We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…
When training large models on limited data, avoiding overfitting is paramount. Common grid search or smarter search methods rely on expensive separate runs for each candidate hyperparameter, while carving out a validation set that reduces…
Many computationally-efficient methods for Bayesian deep learning rely on continuous optimization algorithms, but the implementation of these methods requires significant changes to existing code-bases. In this paper, we propose Vprop, a…
We propose a new Bayesian Neural Net formulation that affords variational inference for which the evidence lower bound is analytically tractable subject to a tight approximation. We achieve this tractability by (i) decomposing ReLU…