Related papers: Mind the Gap when Conditioning Amortised Inference…

In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…

Multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) aim to capture shared latent representations by integrating information from different data modalities. A significant challenge is accurately inferring representations from any subset of modalities…

Inference for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) consists of learning two models: (1) a generative model, which transforms a simple distribution over a latent space into the distribution over observed data, and (2) an inference model, which…

Amortized simulator-based inference offers a powerful framework for tackling Bayesian inference in computational fields such as engineering or neuroscience, increasingly leveraging modern generative methods like diffusion models to map…

Standard probabilistic sparse coding assumes a Laplace prior, a linear mapping from latents to observables, and Gaussian observable distributions. We here derive a solely entropy-based learning objective for the parameters of standard…

We present a latent variable model for classification that provides a novel probabilistic interpretation of neural network softmax classifiers. We derive a variational objective to train the model, analogous to the evidence lower bound…

Training deep generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) requires propagating gradients through stochastic latent variables, which introduces estimation variance that can slow convergence and degrade performance. In this paper,…

Often in machine learning, data are collected as a combination of multiple conditions, e.g., the voice recordings of multiple persons, each labeled with an ID. How could we build a model that captures the latent information related to these…

Amortized inference promises fast test-time Bayesian inference, but existing methods are inherently tied to fixed models. Extending amortization to unseen models typically requires retraining or costly test-time finetuning. In this paper,…

Inference amortization methods share information across multiple posterior-inference problems, allowing each to be carried out more efficiently. Generally, they require the inversion of the dependency structure in the generative model, as…

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…

The variational lower bound (a.k.a. ELBO or free energy) is the central objective for many established as well as for many novel algorithms for unsupervised learning. Such algorithms usually increase the bound until parameters have…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a standard framework for inducing latent variable models that have been shown effective in learning text representations as well as in text generation. The key challenge with using VAEs is the {\it…

One of the core facets of Bayesianism is in the updating of prior beliefs in light of new evidence$\text{ -- }$so how can we maintain a Bayesian approach if we have no prior beliefs in the first place? This is one of the central challenges…

Latent variable time-series models are among the most heavily used tools from machine learning and applied statistics. These models have the advantage of learning latent structure both from noisy observations and from the temporal ordering…

Latent-variable energy-based models (LVEBMs) assign a single normalized energy to joint pairs of observed data and latent variables, offering expressive generative modeling while capturing hidden structure. We recast maximum-likelihood…

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is a useful tool for efficiently learning probabilistic models in machine learning. Generally approximate posteriors learned by ADVI are forced to be unimodal in order to facilitate use…

Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) are known to generate blurry and inconsistent samples. One reason for this is the "prior hole" problem. A prior hole refers to regions that have high probability under the VAE's prior but low probability…

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Deep latent variable models (LVM) such as variational auto-encoder (VAE) have recently played an important role in text generation. One key factor is the exploitation of smooth latent structures to guide the generation. However, the…