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Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-05 Alexander Buchholz , Florian Wenzel , Stephan Mandt

As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-05 Anirban Bhattacharya , Debdeep Pati , Yun Yang

The efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) depends on how the underlying geometry of the problem is taken into account. For distributions with strongly varying curvature, Riemannian metrics help in efficient exploration of the target…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-03 Marcelo Hartmann , Mark Girolami , Arto Klami

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Dang H. Nguyen , Duy Nguyen

A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Lucas Kock , Scott A. Sisson , G. S. Rodrigues , David J. Nott

Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) are hierarchical generalizations of Gaussian Processes that combine well calibrated uncertainty estimates with the high flexibility of multilayer models. One of the biggest challenges with these models is that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-13 Marton Havasi , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Juan José Murillo-Fuentes

Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

Gaussian variational approximation is a popular methodology to approximate posterior distributions in Bayesian inference especially in high dimensional and large data settings. To control the computational cost while being able to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Bingxin Zhou , Junbin Gao , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Richard Gerlach

Traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often struggle with sharp curvatures, intricate geometries, and multimodal distributions. Slice sampling can resolve local exploration inefficiency issues, and Riemannian geometries help…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Bernardo Williams , Hanlin Yu , Hoang Phuc Hau Luu , Georgios Arvanitidis , Arto Klami

Variational Inference (VI) provides a scalable framework for Bayesian inference by optimizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), but convergence analysis remains challenging due to the objective's non-convexity and non-smoothness in Euclidean…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-20 Sushil Bohara , Amedeo Roberto Esposito

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-27 Aurya S. Javeed , Drew P. Kouri , Thomas M. Surowiec

In various industrial contexts, estimating the distribution of unobserved random vectors Xi from some noisy indirect observations H(Xi) + Ui is required. If the relation between Xi and the quantity H(Xi), measured with the error Ui, is…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-08-25 Shuai Fu , Mathieu Couplet , Nicolas Bousquet

The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Anya Katsevich , Philippe Rigollet

This paper is concerned with the approximation of probability distributions known up to normalization constants, with a focus on Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in scientific computing. In this context, key challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Baojun Che , Yifan Chen , Zhenghao Huan , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Weijie Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Bohan Wu , David Blei

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…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-26 Geetakrishnasai Gunapati , Anirudh Jain , P. K. Srijith , Shantanu Desai

Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Seunghyeon Kim , Kwangmin Lee , Yeonhee Park

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…

Seismic tomography is a methodology to image the interior of solid or fluid media, and is often used to map properties in the subsurface of the Earth. In order to better interpret the resulting images it is important to assess imaging…

Geophysics · Physics 2020-05-20 Xin Zhang , Andrew Curtis