Related papers: Variational Refinement for Importance Sampling Usi…
Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…
Variational Bayes (VB), a method originating from machine learning, enables fast and scalable estimation of complex probabilistic models. Thus far, applications of VB in discrete choice analysis have been limited to mixed logit models with…
To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the…
Variational inference is an approximation framework for Bayesian inference that seeks to improve quantified uncertainty in predictions by optimizing a simplified distribution over parameters to stand in for the full posterior. Capturing…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn the reward function from expert trajectories, to understand the task for imitation or collaboration thereby removing the need for manual reward engineering. However, IRL in the context of…
Diffusion bridges are a promising class of deep-learning methods for sampling from unnormalized distributions. Recent works show that the Log Variance (LV) loss consistently outperforms the reverse Kullback-Leibler (rKL) loss when using the…
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,…
We study two adaptive importance sampling schemes for estimating the probability of a rare event in the high-dimensional regime $d \to \infty$ with $d$ the dimension. The first scheme is the prominent cross-entropy (CE) method, and the…
Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…
Bayesian nonparametric statistics is an area of considerable research interest. While recently there has been an extensive concentration in developing Bayesian nonparametric procedures for model checking, the use of the Dirichlet process,…
Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…
Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) offers a principled and flexible framework for conducting Bayesian inference in any situation where forward simulations are feasible. However, validating the accuracy and reliability of the inferred…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
While it's always possible to compute a variational approximation to a posterior distribution, it can be difficult to discover problems with this approximation. We propose two diagnostic algorithms to alleviate this problem. The…
We investigate the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on individual subjects from observational data, this is a central problem in various application domains, including healthcare, social sciences, and online…
In discriminative settings such as regression and classification there are two random variables at play, the inputs X and the targets Y. Here, we demonstrate that the Variational Information Bottleneck can be viewed as a compromise between…
We provide a rigorous analysis of training by variational inference (VI) of Bayesian neural networks in the two-layer and infinite-width case. We consider a regression problem with a regularized evidence lower bound (ELBO) which is…
Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are a popular class of Bayesian hierarchical models that include Gaussian processes, as well as certain spatial models and mixed-effect models. Efficient Bayesian inference of LGMs often requires marginalizing…
Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide reliable…