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Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Yuda Shao , Shan Yu , Tianshu Feng

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

Inference for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) consists of learning two models: (1) a generative model, which transforms a simple distribution over a latent space into the distribution over observed data, and (2) an inference model, which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-14 Yaniv Yacoby , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular combination of deep latent variable model and accompanying variational learning technique. By using a neural inference network to approximate the model's posterior on latent variables, VAEs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Junxian He , Daniel Spokoyny , Graham Neubig , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Heiko Zimmermann , Hao Wu , Babak Esmaeili , Jan-Willem van de Meent

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Yingzhi Xia , Qifeng Liao , Jinglai Li

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-26 Yash Patel , Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier , Ambuj Tewari

We present a generative modeling approach based on the variational inference framework for likelihood-free simulation-based inference. The method leverages latent variables within variational autoencoders to efficiently estimate complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mayank Nautiyal , Andrey Shternshis , Andreas Hellander , Prashant Singh

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…

Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

Highly expressive directed latent variable models, such as sigmoid belief networks, are difficult to train on large datasets because exact inference in them is intractable and none of the approximate inference methods that have been applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-06 Andriy Mnih , Karol Gregor

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Manushi Welandawe , Michael Riis Andersen , Aki Vehtari , Jonathan H. Huggins

Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-21 Amir Zadeh , Smon Hessner , Yao-Chong Lim , Louis-Phlippe Morency

Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-07 Dongkyu Derek Cho , Won Chang , Jaewoo Park

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

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

Deploying Vision Transformers on edge devices is challenging due to their high computational complexity, while full offloading to cloud resources presents significant latency overheads. We propose a novel collaborative inference framework,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hao Liu , Suhaib A. Fahmy