Related papers: Challenges and Opportunities in High-dimensional V…
Several fundamental problems in science and engineering consist of global optimization tasks involving unknown high-dimensional (black-box) functions that map a set of controllable variables to the outcomes of an expensive experiment.…
We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…
Data often are formed of multiple modalities, which jointly describe the observed phenomena. Modeling the joint distribution of multimodal data requires larger expressive power to capture high-level concepts and provide better data…
Traditional approaches to variational inference rely on parametric families of variational distributions, with the choice of family playing a critical role in determining the accuracy of the resulting posterior approximation. Simple…
Current variational inference methods for hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric models can neither characterize the correlation structure among latent variables due to the mean-field setting, nor infer the true posterior dimension because of…
In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…
We propose a residual randomization procedure designed for robust Lasso-based inference in the high-dimensional setting. Compared to earlier work that focuses on sub-Gaussian errors, the proposed procedure is designed to work robustly in…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. It has been empirically observed that MFVI optimizers often suffer from mode collapse.…
Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…
Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…
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…
In this paper, we address the problem of convergence of sequential variational inference filter (VIF) through the application of a robust variational objective and Hinf-norm based correction for a linear Gaussian system. As the dimension of…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) greatly enriches the expressiveness of variational families by considering implicit variational distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. However, due to the intractable densities of…
Optimizing high-dimensional black-box functions under black-box constraints is a pervasive task in a wide range of scientific and engineering problems. These problems are typically harder than unconstrained problems due to hard-to-find…
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…
Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…
We propose bandit importance sampling (BIS), a powerful importance sampling framework tailored for settings in which evaluating the target density is computationally expensive. BIS facilitates accurate sampling while minimizing the required…
Random feature latent variable models (RFLVMs) represent the state-of-the-art in latent variable models, capable of handling non-Gaussian likelihoods and effectively uncovering patterns in high-dimensional data. However, their heavy…