Related papers: Variational Rejection Particle Filtering
Variance regularized counterfactual risk minimization (VRCRM) has been proposed as an alternative off-policy learning (OPL) method. VRCRM method uses a lower-bound on the $f$-divergence between the logging policy and the target policy as…
We propose a simultaneous learning and pruning algorithm capable of identifying and eliminating irrelevant structures in a neural network during the early stages of training. Thus, the computational cost of subsequent training iterations,…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
We analyse optimum reject strategies for prototype-based classifiers and real-valued rejection measures, using the distance of a data point to the closest prototype or probabilistic counterparts. We compare reject schemes with global…
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…
Bayesian Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a promising approach for understanding uncertainty and structure in matrix data. However, a large volume of applied work optimizes traditional non-Bayesian NMF objectives that fail to…
Bayesian inference offers benefits over maximum likelihood, but it also comes with computational costs. Computing the posterior is typically intractable, as is marginalizing that posterior to form the posterior predictive distribution. In…
In this paper we consider a fractional stochastic volatility model, that is a model in which the volatility may exhibit a long-range dependent or a rough/antipersistent behavior. We propose a dynamic sequential Monte Carlo methodology that…
The quest for biologically plausible deep learning is driven, not just by the desire to explain experimentally-observed properties of biological neural networks, but also by the hope of discovering more efficient methods for training…
This paper provides a new methodology to analyze unobserved heterogeneity when observed characteristics are modeled nonlinearly. The proposed model builds on varying random coefficients (VRC) that are determined by nonlinear functions of…
Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…
This paper discusses variance estimation in sequential Monte Carlo methods, alternatively termed particle filters. The variance estimator that we propose is a natural modification of that suggested by H. P. Chan and T. L. Lai [A general…
Using an alternative notion of entropy introduced by Datta, the max-entropy, we present a new simplified framework to study the minimizers of the specific free energy for random fields which are weakly dependent in the sense of Lewis,…
Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…
Using techniques from Poisson approximation, we prove explicit error bounds on the number of permutations that avoid any pattern. Most generally, we bound the total variation distance between the joint distribution of pattern occurrences…
Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated a capacity for perceptually impressive synthesis, but can they also be great likelihood-based models? We answer this in the affirmative, and introduce a family of diffusion-based…
We introduce conditional push-forward neural networks (CPFN), a generative framework for conditional distribution estimation. Instead of directly modeling the conditional density $f_{Y|X}$, CPFN learns a stochastic map…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…
Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…