Related papers: Efficient Semi-Implicit Variational Inference
Decomposition of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective of VAE used for density estimation revealed the deficiency of VAE for representation learning and suggested ways to improve the model. In this paper, we investigate whether we can…
Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…
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 present Quantized Variational Inference, a new algorithm for Evidence Lower Bound maximization. We show how Optimal Voronoi Tesselation produces variance free gradients for ELBO optimization at the cost of introducing asymptotically…
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…
Stein variational inference (SVI) is a sample-based approximate Bayesian inference technique that generates a sample set by jointly optimizing the samples' locations to minimize an information-theoretic measure of discrepancy with the…
This paper tackles the challenge of multi-sensor multi-object tracking by proposing various decentralised Variational Inference (VI) schemes that match the tracking performance of centralised sensor fusion with only local message exchanges…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…
Large spatial datasets with non-Gaussian responses are increasingly common in environmental monitoring, ecology, and remote sensing, yet scalable Bayesian inference for such data remains challenging. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods…
We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…
The estimation of the Extreme Value Index (EVI) is fundamental in extreme value analysis but suffers from high variance due to reliance on only a few extreme observations. We propose a control variates based transfer learning approach in a…
Recent work in unsupervised representation learning has focused on learning deep directed latent-variable models. Fitting these models by maximizing the marginal likelihood or evidence is typically intractable, thus a common approximation…
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.…
Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…
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…
Inference in discrete graphical models with variational methods is difficult because of the inability to re-parameterize gradients of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). Many sampling-based methods have been proposed for estimating these…
We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…