Related papers: Nested Variational Inference
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…
Hidden Markov models provide a natural statistical framework for the detection of the copy number variations (CNV) in genomics. In this paper, we consider a Hidden Markov Model involving several correlated hidden processes at the same time.…
Maximizing the log-likelihood is a crucial aspect of learning latent variable models, and variational inference (VI) stands as the commonly adopted method. However, VI can encounter challenges in achieving a high log-likelihood when dealing…
Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…
Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…
The detection of rare variants is important for understanding the genetic heterogeneity in mixed samples. Recently, next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have enabled the identification of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in mixed…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…
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…
Bayesian inference involves two main computational challenges. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the posterior distribution may well be highly multi-modal: a regime in which the convergence to stationarity of…
Nested Sampling is a method for computing the Bayesian evidence, also called the marginal likelihood, which is the integral of the likelihood with respect to the prior. More generally, it is a numerical probabilistic quadrature rule. The…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…
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)…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…
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…
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…
Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…
Nested dropout is a variant of dropout operation that is able to order network parameters or features based on the pre-defined importance during training. It has been explored for: I. Constructing nested nets: the nested nets are neural…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have given us a great tool to fit implicit generative models to data. Implicit distributions are ones we can sample from easily, and take derivatives of samples with respect to model parameters. These…
Despite the advances in the representational capacity of approximate distributions for variational inference, the optimization process can still limit the density that is ultimately learned. We demonstrate the drawbacks of biasing the true…