Related papers: Pathfinder: Parallel quasi-Newton variational infe…
Bayesian posterior inference is prevalent in various machine learning problems. Variational inference provides one way to approximate the posterior distribution, however its expressive power is limited and so is the accuracy of resulting…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is a popular class of methods for sampling from an intractable target distribution using a sequence of simpler intermediate distributions. Like other importance sampling-based methods,…
In the gravitational-wave analysis of pulsar-timing-array datasets, parameter estimation is usually performed using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to explore posterior probability densities. We introduce an alternative procedure that…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
Image retrieval is crucial in robotics and computer vision, with downstream applications in robot place recognition and vision-based product recommendations. Modern retrieval systems face two key challenges: scalability and efficiency.…
ABC (approximate Bayesian computation) is a general approach for dealing with models with an intractable likelihood. In this work, we derive ABC algorithms based on QMC (quasi- Monte Carlo) sequences. We show that the resulting ABC…
We sample from a given target distribution by constructing a neural network which maps samples from a simple reference, e.g. the standard normal distribution, to samples from the target. To that end, we propose using a neural network…
This paper presents a new derivation of the variational Poisson multi-Bernoulli (V-PMB) filter for multi-target estimation proposed in [#Williams15]. The proposed derivation is based on considering an augmented space that includes the set…
Sequential optimization methods are often confronted with the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional spaces. Current approaches under the Gaussian process framework are still burdened by the computational complexity of tracking…
The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov Chain Monte Carlo schemes for generating samples from Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm is asymptotically exact, flexible and easy to implement.…
Statistical inference of analytically non-tractable posteriors is a difficult problem because of marginalization of correlated variables and stochastic methods such as MCMC and VI are commonly used. We argue that stochastic KL divergence…
The Sliced-Wasserstein distance (SW) is being increasingly used in machine learning applications as an alternative to the Wasserstein distance and offers significant computational and statistical benefits. Since it is defined as an…
We study signal processing tasks in which the signal is mapped via some generalized time-frequency transform to a higher dimensional time-frequency space, processed there, and synthesized to an output signal. We show how to approximate such…
This paper proposes a new sampling scheme based on Langevin dynamics that is applicable within pseudo-marginal and particle Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. We investigate this algorithm's theoretical properties under standard…
This work introduces a new approximate proximal sampler that operates solely with zeroth-order information of the potential function. Prior theoretical analyses have revealed that proximal sampling corresponds to alternating forward and…
The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…
Achieving invariance to nuisance transformations is a fundamental challenge in the construction of robust and reliable vision systems. Existing approaches to invariance scale exponentially with the dimension of the family of…
Predictive posterior densities (PPDs) are of interest in approximate Bayesian inference. Typically, these are estimated by simple Monte Carlo (MC) averages using samples from the approximate posterior. We observe that the signal-to-noise…
The efficient approximation of quantity of interest derived from PDEs with lognormal diffusivity is a central challenge in uncertainty quantification. In this study, we propose a multilevel quasi-Monte Carlo framework to approximate…
Assume that we would like to estimate the expected value of a function $F$ with respect to an intractable density $\pi$, which is specified up to some unknown normalising constant. We prove that if $\pi$ is close enough under KL divergence…