English
Related papers

Related papers: Likelihood-Free Inference with Generative Neural N…

200 papers

We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-29 Guillaume Alain , Yoshua Bengio , Li Yao , Jason Yosinski , Eric Thibodeau-Laufer , Saizheng Zhang , Pascal Vincent

We introduce a novel combination of Bayesian Models (BMs) and Neural Networks (NNs) for making predictions with a minimum expected risk. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, the data efficiency and interpretability of a BM with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Mathias Löwe , Per Lunnemann Hansen , Sebastian Risi

Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) is a method that merges principles from Bayesian statistics and reinforcement learning to make optimal decisions in uncertain environments. As a model-based RL method, it has two key components: (1)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Shreya Sinha Roy , Richard G. Everitt , Christian P. Robert , Ritabrata Dutta

In this work, we investigate the use of normalizing flows to model conditional distributions. In particular, we use our proposed method to analyze inverse problems with invertible neural networks by maximizing the posterior likelihood. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Zhisheng Xiao , Qing Yan , Yali Amit

Scientists continue to develop increasingly complex mechanistic models to reflect their knowledge more realistically. Statistical inference using these models can be challenging since the corresponding likelihood function is often…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-07 Joshua J Bon , David J Warne , David J Nott , Christopher Drovandi

Normalizing Flows are generative models that directly maximize the likelihood. Previously, the design of normalizing flows was largely constrained by the need for analytical invertibility. We overcome this constraint by a training procedure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Felix Draxler , Peter Sorrenson , Lea Zimmermann , Armand Rousselot , Ullrich Köthe

Training normalizing flow generative models can be challenging due to the need to calculate computationally expensive determinants of Jacobians. This paper studies the likelihood-free training of flows and proposes the energy objective, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Phillip Si , Zeyi Chen , Subham Sekhar Sahoo , Yair Schiff , Volodymyr Kuleshov

We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Pranjal Awasthi , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Ravi Kumar , Kamesh Munagala

Simulation-based inference enables learning the parameters of a model even when its likelihood cannot be computed in practice. One class of methods uses data simulated with different parameters to infer models of the likelihood-to-evidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Giulio Isacchini , Natanael Spisak , Armita Nourmohammad , Thierry Mora , Aleksandra M. Walczak

State-of-the-art neural network-based methods for learning summary statistics have delivered promising results for simulation-based likelihood-free parameter inference. Existing approaches require density estimation as a post-processing…

Likelihood-free inference involves inferring parameter values given observed data and a simulator model. The simulator is computer code which takes parameters, performs stochastic calculations, and outputs simulated data. In this work, we…

Computation · Statistics 2023-01-30 Dennis Prangle , Cecilia Viscardi

In many fields of science, generalized likelihood ratio tests are established tools for statistical inference. At the same time, it has become increasingly common that a simulator (or generative model) is used to describe complex processes…

Applications · Statistics 2016-03-21 Kyle Cranmer , Juan Pavez , Gilles Louppe

In many statistical problems, the data distribution is specified through a generative process for which the likelihood function is analytically intractable, yet inference on the associated model parameters remains of primary interest. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-01 Haoyu Jiang , Yuexi Wang , Yun Yang

Generative Bayesian Filtering (GBF) provides a powerful and flexible framework for performing posterior inference in complex nonlinear and non-Gaussian state-space models. Our approach extends Generative Bayesian Computation (GBC) to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-07 Edoardo Marcelli , Sean O'Hagan , Veronika Rockova

The traditional approach of hand-crafting priors (such as sparsity) for solving inverse problems is slowly being replaced by the use of richer learned priors (such as those modeled by deep generative networks). In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Viraj Shah , Rakib Hyder , M. Salman Asif , Chinmay Hegde

Bayesian posterior distributions arising in modern applications, including inverse problems in partial differential equation models in tomography and subsurface flow, are often computationally intractable due to the large computational cost…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-10 Tapio Helin , Andrew Stuart , Aretha Teckentrup , Konstantinos Zygalakis

Meta-Learning is a family of methods that use a set of interrelated tasks to learn a model that can quickly learn a new query task from a possibly small contextual dataset. In this study, we use a probabilistic framework to formalize what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-03 Shin-ichi Maeda , Toshiki Nakanishi , Masanori Koyama

In many real-world problems, there is a limited set of training data, but an abundance of unlabeled data. We propose a new method, Generative Posterior Networks (GPNs), that uses unlabeled data to estimate epistemic uncertainty in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Melrose Roderick , Felix Berkenkamp , Fatemeh Sheikholeslami , Zico Kolter

We formulate the inverse problem in a Bayesian framework and aim to train a generative model that allows us to simulate (i.e., sample from the likelihood) and do inference (i.e., sample from the posterior). We review the use of triangular…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-05 Tristan van Leeuwen , Christoph Brune , Marcello Carioni

The Bayesian approach to solving inverse problems relies on the choice of a prior. This critical ingredient allows the formulation of expert knowledge or physical constraints in a probabilistic fashion and plays an important role for the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-08 Manuel Marschall , Gerd Wübbeler , Franko Schmähling , Clemens Elster