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Related papers: Variational methods for simulation-based inference

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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…

We present Sequential Neural Likelihood (SNL), a new method for Bayesian inference in simulator models, where the likelihood is intractable but simulating data from the model is possible. SNL trains an autoregressive flow on simulated data…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-23 George Papamakarios , David C. Sterratt , Iain Murray

Neural likelihood estimation methods for simulation-based inference can suffer from performance degradation when the modeled data is very high-dimensional or lies along a lower-dimensional manifold, which is due to the inability of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-12 Simon Dirmeier , Carlo Albert , Fernando Perez-Cruz

Neural simulation-based inference (SBI) is a popular set of methods for Bayesian inference when models are only available in the form of a simulator. These methods are widely used in the sciences and engineering, where writing down a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-15 Yuga Hikida , Ayush Bharti , Niall Jeffrey , François-Xavier Briol

Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-03 Dingbo Wu , Fangzheng Xie

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a common name for an emerging family of approaches that infer the model parameters when the likelihood is intractable. Existing SBI methods either approximate the likelihood, such as Approximate Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Theo Gruner , Boris Belousov , Fabio Muratore , Daniel Palenicek , Jan Peters

Continual learning in neural networks aims to learn new tasks without forgetting old tasks. Sequential function-space variational inference (SFSVI) uses a Gaussian variational distribution to approximate the distribution of the outputs of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Menghao Waiyan William Zhu , Pengcheng Hao , Ercan Engin Kuruoğlu

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

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-29 Alexander Moreno , Tameem Adel , Edward Meeds , James M. Rehg , Max Welling

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…

Probabilistic state estimation is essential for robots navigating uncertain environments. Accurately and efficiently managing uncertainty in estimated states is key to robust robotic operation. However, nonlinearities in robotic platforms…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Min-Won Seo , Solmaz S. Kia

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

Bayesian inference allows expressing the uncertainty of posterior belief under a probabilistic model given prior information and the likelihood of the evidence. Predominantly, the likelihood function is only implicitly established by a…

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a promising Bayesian inference framework that alleviates the need for analytic likelihoods to estimate posterior distributions. Recent advances using neural density estimators in SBI algorithms have…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-07-13 Justine Zeghal , François Lanusse , Alexandre Boucaud , Benjamin Remy , Eric Aubourg

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

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) offer uncertainty quantification but come with the downside of substantially increased training and inference costs. Sparse BNNs have been investigated for efficient inference, typically by either slowly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Junbo Li , Zichen Miao , Qiang Qiu , Ruqi Zhang

Simulation-based Bayesian inference (SBI) can be used to estimate the parameters of complex mechanistic models given observed model outputs without requiring access to explicit likelihood evaluations. A prime example for the application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Jonas Beck , Michael Deistler , Yves Bernaerts , Jakob Macke , Philipp Berens

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

Future wireless networks are envisioned to provide ubiquitous sensing services, which also gives rise to a substantial demand for high-dimensional non-convex parameter estimation, i.e., the associated likelihood function is non-convex and…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-10 Zhixiang Hu , An Liu , Minjian Zhao

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Andrew Millard , Joshua Murphy , Peter Green , Simon Maskell
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