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The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…

In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…

The automation of probabilistic reasoning is one of the primary aims of machine learning. Recently, the confluence of variational inference and deep learning has led to powerful and flexible automatic inference methods that can be trained…

Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator…

Simulation-based Inference (SBI) is a widely used set of algorithms to learn the parameters of complex scientific simulation models. While primarily run on CPUs in HPC clusters, these algorithms have been shown to scale in performance when…

Optimal control under uncertainty is a prevailing challenge for many reasons. One of the critical difficulties lies in producing tractable solutions for the underlying stochastic optimization problem. We show how advanced approximate…

Variational approximation has been widely used in large-scale Bayesian inference recently, the simplest kind of which involves imposing a mean field assumption to approximate complicated latent structures. Despite the computational…

Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…

The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and the…

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

In many safety-critical settings, probabilistic ML systems have to make predictions subject to algebraic constraints, e.g., predicting the most likely trajectory that does not cross obstacles. These real-world constraints are rarely convex,…

Recent advances in statistical inference have significantly expanded the toolbox of probabilistic modeling. Historically, probabilistic modeling has been constrained to (i) very restricted model classes where exact or approximate…

Stochastic optimisation algorithms are the de facto standard for machine learning with large amounts of data. Handling only a subset of available data in each optimisation step dramatically reduces the per-iteration computational costs,…

This paper describes an approach to simultaneously identify clusters and estimate cluster-specific regression parameters from the given data. Such an approach can be useful in learning the relationship between input and output when the…

Variational Inference makes a trade-off between the capacity of the variational family and the tractability of finding an approximate posterior distribution. Instead, Boosting Variational Inference allows practitioners to obtain…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…