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Recent research has seen several advances relevant to black-box VI, but the current state of automatic posterior inference is unclear. One such advance is the use of normalizing flows to define flexible posterior densities for deep latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Abhinav Agrawal , Daniel Sheldon , Justin Domke

Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Seunghyeon Kim , Kwangmin Lee , Yeonhee Park

This article considers Bayesian model selection via mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Towards this goal, we study the non-asymptotic properties of MF inference under the Bayesian framework that allows latent variables and model…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-12-29 Yangfan Zhang , Yun Yang

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

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-31 Jakob Knollmüller , Torsten A. Enßlin

Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…

Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jinlin Lai , Antonio Linero , Yuling Yao

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Tom Huix , Anna Korba , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines

The expressiveness of flow-based models combined with stochastic variational inference (SVI) has expanded the application of optimization-based Bayesian inference to highly complex problems. However, despite the importance of multi-model…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-17 Laurence Davies , Dan Mackinlay , Rafael Oliveira , Scott A. Sisson

Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-29 Blake Hansen , Alejandra Avalos-Pacheco , Massimiliano Russo , Roberta De Vito

Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-05 Minh-Ngoc Tran , David J. Nott , Robert Kohn

Reconstructing the evolutionary history relating a collection of molecular sequences is the main subject of modern Bayesian phylogenetic inference. However, the commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be inefficient due to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-12 Tianyu Xie , Frederick A. Matsen , Marc A. Suchard , Cheng Zhang

Variational Bayes is a popular method for approximate inference but its derivation can be cumbersome. To simplify the process, we give a 3-step recipe to identify the posterior form by explicitly looking for linearity with respect to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

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

Variational inference (VI) is a cornerstone of modern Bayesian learning, enabling approximate inference in complex models. However, its formulation depends on expectations and divergences defined through high-dimensional integrals, often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-21 Jasraj Singh , Shelvia Wongso , Jeremie Houssineau , Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Ilsang Ohn , Lizhen Lin

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li , Christopher De Sa , Sam Devlin , Cheng Zhang

We propose Diffusion Model Variational Inference (DMVI), a novel method for automated approximate inference in probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). DMVI utilizes diffusion models as variational approximations to the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Simon Dirmeier , Fernando Perez-Cruz

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Felix Leibfried