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Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Francesco Locatello , Gideon Dresdner , Rajiv Khanna , Isabel Valera , Gunnar Rätsch

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) methods due to their ability to rapidly generate samples from complex distributions. However, since the likelihood of these samples is non-trivial to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Tobias Pielok , Bernd Bischl , David Rügamer

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-16 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Wu Lin , Voot Tangkaratt , Zuozhu Liu , Didrik Nielsen

In this paper, we introduce a novel, data-driven approach for solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems based on partial differential equations (PDEs), called Weak Neural Variational Inference (WNVI). The method complements real…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-31 Vincent C. Scholz , Yaohua Zang , Phaedon-Stelios Koutsourelakis

We develop an automated variational inference method for Bayesian structured prediction problems with Gaussian process (GP) priors and linear-chain likelihoods. Our approach does not need to know the details of the structured likelihood…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-15 Pietro Galliani , Amir Dezfouli , Edwin V. Bonilla , Novi Quadrianto

Bayesian Optimization using Gaussian Processes is a popular approach to deal with the optimization of expensive black-box functions. However, because of the a priori on the stationarity of the covariance matrix of classic Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-10 Ali Hebbal , Loic Brevault , Mathieu Balesdent , El-Ghazali Talbi , Nouredine Melab

We present a data-driven Bayesian nonparametric approach for global optimization (DaBNO) of stochastic black-box function. The function value depends on the distribution of a random vector. However, this distribution is usually complex and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Haowei Wang , Xun Zhang , Szu Hui Ng , Songhao Wang

Recent machine learning advances have proposed black-box estimation of unknown continuous-time system dynamics directly from data. However, earlier works are based on approximative ODE solutions or point estimates. We propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Pashupati Hegde , Çağatay Yıldız , Harri Lähdesmäki , Samuel Kaski , Markus Heinonen

Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Trevor Campbell , Xinglong Li

We develop a Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for Bayesian Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regression with linear weight parameterizations. The model separates impact coeffcients from weighting function parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Luigi Simeone

In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Charles C. Margossian , David M. Blei

Bayesian optimization is a powerful tool for expensive stochastic black-box optimization problems such as simulation-based optimization or machine learning hyperparameter tuning. Many stochastic objective functions implicitly require a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Michael Pearce , Matthias Poloczek , Juergen Branke

Modern neural networks tend to be overconfident on unseen, noisy or incorrectly labelled data and do not produce meaningful uncertainty measures. Bayesian deep learning aims to address this shortcoming with variational approximations (such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-28 Nick Pawlowski , Andrew Brock , Matthew C. H. Lee , Martin Rajchl , Ben Glocker

Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-26 Jiaxin Shi , Shengyang Sun , Jun Zhu

Bayesian methods have shown success in deep learning applications. For example, in predictive tasks, Bayesian neural networks leverage Bayesian reasoning of model uncertainty to improve the reliability and uncertainty awareness of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Wenlong Chen , Bolian Li , Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li

Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Nan Feng , Xun Huan

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-02 Andre Carlon , Luis Espath , Raul Tempone

Solving for adversarial examples with projected gradient descent has been demonstrated to be highly effective in fooling the neural network based classifiers. However, in the black-box setting, the attacker is limited only to the query…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Seungyong Moon , Gaon An , Hyun Oh Song

Understanding how different classes are distributed in an unlabeled data set is an important challenge for the calibration of probabilistic classifiers and uncertainty quantification. Approaches like adjusted classify and count, black-box…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-19 Albert Ziegler , Paweł Czyż