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Variational Bayes (VB) has shown itself to be a powerful approximation method in many application areas. This paper describes some diagnostics methods which can assess how well the VB approximates the true posterior, particularly with…
We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) procedure for high-dimensional linear model inferences with heavy tail shrinkage priors, such as student-t prior. Theoretically, we establish the consistency of the proposed VB method and prove that…
Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
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,…
Variational inference often struggles with the posterior geometry exhibited by complex hierarchical Bayesian models. Recent advances in flow-based variational families and Variationally Inferred Parameters (VIP) each address aspects of this…
A key challenge for modern Bayesian statistics is how to perform scalable inference of posterior distributions. To address this challenge, variational Bayes (VB) methods have emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain…
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…
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…
In Bayesian analysis, the posterior follows from the data and a choice of a prior and a likelihood. One hopes that the posterior is robust to reasonable variation in the choice of prior and likelihood, since this choice is made by the…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a recent approximate method for Bayesian inference. It has the merit of being a fast and scalable alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) but its approximation error is often unknown. In this paper, we…
Continuously-indexed flows (CIFs) have recently achieved improvements over baseline normalizing flows on a variety of density estimation tasks. CIFs do not possess a closed-form marginal density, and so, unlike standard flows, cannot be…
Weight space symmetries in neural network architectures, such as permutation symmetries in MLPs, give rise to Bayesian neural network (BNN) posteriors with many equivalent modes. This multimodality poses a challenge for variational…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
Mean-field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is an approximate Bayesian posterior inference technique that is increasingly popular due to its fast runtimes on large-scale datasets. However, even when MFVB provides accurate posterior means for…
We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…
Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Modeling real-world distributions can often be challenging due to sample data that are subjected to perturbations, e.g., instrumentation errors, or added random noise. Since flow models are typically nonlinear algorithms, they amplify these…
Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…