Related papers: Variational inference via Wasserstein gradient flo…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…
Efficiently accessing the information contained in non-linear and high dimensional probability distributions remains a core challenge in modern statistics. Traditionally, estimators that go beyond point estimates are either categorized as…
The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
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…
In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…
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…
Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…
Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…
Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…