Related papers: Pathfinder: Parallel quasi-Newton variational infe…

Correlation filters are special classifiers designed for shift-invariant object recognition, which are robust to pattern distortions. The recent literature shows that combining a set of sub-filters trained based on a single or a small group…

This paper introduces Wasserstein variational inference, a new form of approximate Bayesian inference based on optimal transport theory. Wasserstein variational inference uses a new family of divergences that includes both f-divergences and…

We study the approximation of arbitrary distributions $P$ on $d$-dimensional space by distributions with log-concave density. Approximation means minimizing a Kullback--Leibler-type functional. We show that such an approximation exists if…

In the era of Big Data, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which are currently essential for Bayesian estimation, face significant computational challenges owing to their sequential nature. To achieve a faster and more effective…

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

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…

Poisson log-linear models are ubiquitous in many applications, and one of the most popular approaches for parametric count regression. In the Bayesian context, however, there are no sufficient specific computational tools for efficient…

We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…

Robust Bayesian inference using density power divergence (DPD) has emerged as a promising approach for handling outliers in statistical estimation. Although the DPD-based posterior offers theoretical guarantees of robustness, its practical…

We present a novel method for efficiently producing semi-dense matches across images. Previous detector-free matcher LoFTR has shown remarkable matching capability in handling large-viewpoint change and texture-poor scenarios but suffers…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC…

Recently, some works have suggested methods to combine variational probabilistic inference with Monte Carlo sampling. One promising approach is via local optimal transport. In this approach, a gradient steepest descent method based on local…

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

Mean-field variational inference is one of the most popular approaches to inference in discrete random fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. Thus, in practice,…

We study the efficiency of Thompson sampling for contextual bandits. Existing Thompson sampling-based algorithms need to construct a Laplace approximation (i.e., a Gaussian distribution) of the posterior distribution, which is inefficient…

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and its variants have been widely used for text-to-3D generation by distilling 2D image diffusion priors. However, the standard SDS objective is prone to severe mode collapse, frequently yielding…

Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…

Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…

Normalizing flows model a complex target distribution in terms of a bijective transform operating on a simple base distribution. As such, they enable tractable computation of a number of important statistical quantities, particularly…