Related papers: Accelerating Stochastic Probabilistic Inference
Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…
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…
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 inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with…
Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…
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…
We present a novel formulation for motion planning under uncertainties based on variational inference where the optimal motion plan is modeled as a posterior distribution. We propose a Gaussian variational inference-based framework, termed…
Stochastic variance reduction has proven effective at accelerating first-order algorithms for solving convex finite-sum optimization tasks such as empirical risk minimization. Incorporating second-order information has proven helpful in…
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of…
Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…
Recently a majorization method for optimizing partition functions of log-linear models was proposed alongside a novel quadratic variational upper-bound. In the batch setting, it outperformed state-of-the-art first- and second-order…
Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the…
The stochastic variational inference (SVI) paradigm, which combines variational inference, natural gradients, and stochastic updates, was recently proposed for large-scale data analysis in conjugate Bayesian models and demonstrated to be…
Second-order optimization uses curvature information about the objective function, which can help in faster convergence. However, such methods typically require expensive computation of the Hessian matrix, preventing their usage in a…
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a…
We study online inference and asymptotic covariance estimation for the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. While classical methods (such as plug-in and batch-means estimators) are available, they either require inaccessible…
Motivated by multi-user optimization problems and non-cooperative Nash games in stochastic regimes, we consider stochastic variational inequality (SVI) problems on matrix spaces where the variables are positive semidefinite matrices and the…