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Related papers: Variational methods for simulation-based inference

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Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Bohan Wu , David Blei

We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-19 Dmitry Molchanov , Valery Kharitonov , Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Longlin Yu , Ziheng Cheng , Shiyue Zhang , Cheng Zhang

Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-11 Sherman Khoo , Dennis Prangle , Song Liu , Mark Beaumont

The detection of rare variants is important for understanding the genetic heterogeneity in mixed samples. Recently, next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have enabled the identification of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in mixed…

Genomics · Quantitative Biology 2016-04-25 Fan Zhang , Patrick Flaherty

We describe a limitation in the expressiveness of the predictive uncertainty estimate given by mean-field variational inference (MFVI), a popular approximate inference method for Bayesian neural networks. In particular, MFVI fails to give…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-28 Andrew Y. K. Foong , Yingzhen Li , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Richard E. Turner

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-27 Aurya S. Javeed , Drew P. Kouri , Thomas M. Surowiec

We introduce the sequential neural posterior and likelihood approximation (SNPLA) algorithm. SNPLA is a normalizing flows-based algorithm for inference in implicit models, and therefore is a simulation-based inference method that only…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Samuel Wiqvist , Jes Frellsen , Umberto Picchini

We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-07 Michalis K. Titsias , Francisco J. R. Ruiz

Recent advances in neural density estimation have enabled powerful simulation-based inference (SBI) methods that can flexibly approximate Bayesian inference for intractable stochastic models. Although these methods have demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-17 Matthew O'Callaghan , Kaisey S. Mandel , Gerry Gilmore

Some of the issues that make sampling parameter spaces of various beyond the Standard Model (BSM) scenarios computationally expensive are the high dimensionality of the input parameter space, complex likelihoods, and stringent experimental…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2026-02-16 Atrideb Chatterjee , Arghya Choudhury , Sourav Mitra , Arpita Mondal , Subhadeep Mondal

In recent years, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) have grown in popularity as scalable methods for Bayesian inference. Unfortunately, the properties of such methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-16 Jen Ning Lim , Adam M. Johansen

Making inferences about physical properties of the Universe requires knowledge of the data likelihood. A Gaussian distribution is commonly assumed for the uncertainties with a covariance matrix estimated from a set of simulations. The noise…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-07-09 Jed Homer , Oliver Friedrich , Daniel Gruen

As the large amount of sequencing data accumulated in past decades and it is still accumulating, we need to handle the more and more sequencing data. As the fast development of the computing technologies, we now can handle a large amount of…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2021-01-05 Songting Shi

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-29 Amar Shah , David A. Knowles , Zoubin Ghahramani

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-15 Alp Kucukelbir , Rajesh Ranganath , Andrew Gelman , David M. Blei

When a statistical model $\{P_{\theta} : \theta \in \Theta\}$ lacks analytically tractable likelihoods, parametric statistical inference based on data generated from an unknown underlying distribution $P$ can still be performed as long as…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Peter Matthew Jacobs , Lekha Patel , Anirban Bhattacharya , Debdeep Pati

Despite recent advances, sampling-based inference for Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) remains a significant challenge in probabilistic deep learning. While sampling-based approaches do not require a variational distribution assumption,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Emanuel Sommer , Jakob Robnik , Giorgi Nozadze , Uros Seljak , David Rügamer

We propose Radial Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs): a variational approximate posterior for BNNs which scales well to large models while maintaining a distribution over weight-space with full support. Other scalable Bayesian deep learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-01 Sebastian Farquhar , Michael Osborne , Yarin Gal