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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-19 Dmitry Molchanov , Valery Kharitonov , Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

We introduce a new method for learning Bayesian neural networks, treating them as a stack of multivariate Bayesian linear regression models. The main idea is to infer the layerwise posterior exactly if we know the target outputs of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Richard Kurle , Alexej Klushyn , Ralf Herbrich

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-30 Mingzhang Yin , Mingyuan Zhou

We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Wasu Top Piriyakulkij , Yingheng Wang , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic

Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Minyoung Kim

The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Jay Whang , Stefano Ermon

Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Longlin Yu , Ziheng Cheng , Shiyue Zhang , Cheng Zhang

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) has been introduced to expand the analytical variational families by defining expressive semi-implicit distributions in a hierarchical manner. However, the single-layer architecture commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Longlin Yu , Tianyu Xie , Yu Zhu , Tong Yang , Xiangyu Zhang , Cheng Zhang

Standard deep neural networks (DNNs) are commonly trained in an end-to-end fashion for specific tasks such as object recognition, face identification, or character recognition, among many examples. This specificity often leads to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Raphaël Achddou , J. Matias di Martino , Guillermo Sapiro

Sampling and Variational Inference (VI) are two large families of methods for approximate inference that have complementary strengths. Sampling methods excel at approximating arbitrary probability distributions, but can be inefficient. VI…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-07 Richard D. Lange , Ari Benjamin , Ralf M. Haefner , Xaq Pitkow

Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Parth Paritosh , Nikolay Atanasov , Sonia Martinez

We present a method for feature interpretation that makes use of recent advances in autoregressive density estimation models to invert model representations. We train generative inversion models to express a distribution over input features…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-03 Charlie Nash , Nate Kushman , Christopher K. I. Williams

We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Tim Reichelt , Luke Ong , Tom Rainforth

Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-25 Neil Dey , Emmett B. Kendall

Probabilistic state estimation is essential for robots navigating uncertain environments. Accurately and efficiently managing uncertainty in estimated states is key to robust robotic operation. However, nonlinearities in robotic platforms…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Min-Won Seo , Solmaz S. Kia

Variational inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-14 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Wu Lin