Related papers: Multiple Importance Sampling ELBO and Deep Ensembl…

Co-clustering exploits the duality of instances and features to simultaneously uncover meaningful groups in both dimensions, often outperforming traditional clustering in high-dimensional or sparse data settings. Although recent deep…

For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective for autoregressive language models, but adapting these methods to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) presents fundamental challenges. The core difficulty lies in likelihood…

The Fussell-Vesely Importance (FV) reflects the potential impact of a basic event on system failure, and is crucial for ensuring system reliability. However, traditional methods for calculating FV importance are complex and time-consuming,…

Standard probabilistic sparse coding assumes a Laplace prior, a linear mapping from latents to observables, and Gaussian observable distributions. We here derive a solely entropy-based learning objective for the parameters of standard…

We present Quantized Variational Inference, a new algorithm for Evidence Lower Bound maximization. We show how Optimal Voronoi Tesselation produces variance free gradients for ELBO optimization at the cost of introducing asymptotically…

Diffusion-based generative models have demonstrated a capacity for perceptually impressive synthesis, but can they also be great likelihood-based models? We answer this in the affirmative, and introduce a family of diffusion-based…

In this paper we consider the problem of inference in statistical models characterized by moment restrictions by casting the problem within the Exponentially Tilted Empirical Likelihood (ETEL) framework. Because the ETEL function has a well…

Conflicting objectives present a considerable challenge in interleaving multi-task learning, necessitating the need for meticulous design and balance to ensure effective learning of a representative latent data space across all tasks…

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled optimization of deep reactive policies (DRPs) for continuous MDP planning by encoding a parametric policy as a deep neural network and exploiting automatic differentiation in an end-to-end…

Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…

Auto-encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB) is a powerful and general algorithm for fitting latent variable models (a promising direction for unsupervised learning), and is well-known for training the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). In this…

When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is both a powerful language model and an effective representation learning framework. In practice, however, VAEs are trained with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) as a surrogate…

We explore a new research direction in Bayesian variational inference with discrete latent variable priors where we exploit Kronecker matrix algebra for efficient and exact computations of the evidence lower bound (ELBO). The proposed…

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…

We extend several recent results providing symmetry-based guarantees for variational inference (VI) with location-scale families. VI approximates a target density $p$ by the best match $q^*$ in a family $Q$ of tractable distributions that…

Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference. However, it mainly focuses on the evidence lower bound as variational objective and the development of other measures for variational inference is a promising area of…

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…

To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the…

We investigate the efficiency of a marginal likelihood estimator where the product of the marginal posterior distributions is used as an importance-sampling function. The approach is generally applicable to multi-block parameter vector…