English
Related papers

Related papers: Amortized Variational Inference: A Systematic Revi…

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Sebastian W. Ober

Efficient exploration is one of the most important issues in deep reinforcement learning. To address this issue, recent methods consider the value function parameters as random variables, and resort variational inference to approximate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Haotian Zhang , Yuhao Wang , Jianyong Sun , Zongben Xu

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Bayesian inference for high-dimensional inverse problems is computationally costly and requires selecting a suitable prior distribution. Amortized variational inference addresses these challenges via a neural network that approximates the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-19 Ali Siahkoohi , Gabrio Rizzuti , Rafael Orozco , Felix J. Herrmann

Since the turn of the century, approximate Bayesian inference has steadily evolved as new computational techniques have been incorporated to handle increasingly complex and large-scale predictive problems. The recent success of deep neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-14 Roy Shivam Ram Shreshtth , Arnab Hazra , Gourab Mukherjee

Variational inference (VI) provides a principled framework for estimating posterior distributions over model parameters, enabling explicit modeling of weight uncertainty during optimization. By capturing this uncertainty, VI improves the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-21 Haolin Chen

Classical approaches for approximate inference depend on cleverly designed variational distributions and bounds. Modern approaches employ amortized variational inference, which uses a neural network to approximate any posterior without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Yiming Yan , Melissa Ailem , Fei Sha

It is difficult to use subsampling with variational inference in hierarchical models since the number of local latent variables scales with the dataset. Thus, inference in hierarchical models remains a challenge at large scale. It is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Abhinav Agrawal , Justin Domke

Optimization is a ubiquitous modeling tool and is often deployed in settings which repeatedly solve similar instances of the same problem. Amortized optimization methods use learning to predict the solutions to problems in these settings,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Brandon Amos

Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Amir Zadeh , Santiago Benoit , Louis-Philippe Morency

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Heiko Zimmermann , Hao Wu , Babak Esmaeili , Jan-Willem van de Meent

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

Incorporating a deep generative model as the prior distribution in inverse problems has established substantial success in reconstructing images from corrupted observations. Notwithstanding, the existing optimization approaches use gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Tianci Liu , Tong Yang , Quan Zhang , Qi Lei

Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Minta Liu , Suliang Bu

The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Jay Whang , Stefano Ermon

Given some observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference aims at obtaining the distribution of a model's latent parameters that could have yielded the data. This task is challenging for large population studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Louis Rouillard , Thomas Moreau , Demian Wassermann

Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-07 Dongkyu Derek Cho , Won Chang , Jaewoo Park

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

A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Lucas Kock , Scott A. Sisson , G. S. Rodrigues , David J. Nott

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jinlin Lai , Antonio Linero , Yuling Yao