Related papers: A Framework for Improving the Reliability of Black…
Leveraging well-established MCMC strategies, we propose MCMC-interactive variational inference (MIVI) to not only estimate the posterior in a time constrained manner, but also facilitate the design of MCMC transitions. Constructing a…
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…
Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…
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…
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…
We present the Variational Adaptive Newton (VAN) method which is a black-box optimization method especially suitable for explorative-learning tasks such as active learning and reinforcement learning. Similar to Bayesian methods, VAN…
Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…
Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…
For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…
Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful framework for optimizing black-box, expensive-to-evaluate functions. Over the past decade, many algorithms have been proposed to integrate cheaper, lower-fidelity approximations of the objective…
Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…
Many safety failures in machine learning arise when models are used to assign predictions to people (often in settings like lending, hiring, or content moderation) without accounting for how individuals can change their inputs. In this…
Robust estimators for linear regression require non-convex objective functions to shield against adverse affects of outliers. This non-convexity brings challenges, particularly when combined with penalization in high-dimensional settings.…
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…
The widescale deployment of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) appears to be imminent despite many safety challenges that are yet to be resolved. It is well-known that there are no universally agreed Verification and Validation (VV) methodologies…
The problem of data uncertainty has motivated the incorporation of robust optimization in various arenas, beyond the Markowitz portfolio optimization. This work presents the extension of the robust optimization framework for the…
Variational families with full-rank covariance approximations are known not to work well in black-box variational inference (BBVI), both empirically and theoretically. In fact, recent computational complexity results for BBVI have…