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Bayesian inference provides a natural way of incorporating prior beliefs and assigning a probability measure to the space of hypotheses. Current solutions rely on iterative routines like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Sarthak Mittal , Niels Leif Bracher , Guillaume Lajoie , Priyank Jaini , Marcus Brubaker

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-02 Bohan Wu , David Blei

Gaussian processes (GPs) are Bayesian nonparametric models for function approximation with principled predictive uncertainty estimates. Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) are multilayer generalizations of GPs that can represent complex marginal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-20 Qiuxian Meng , Yongyou Zhang

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Yingzhi Xia , Qifeng Liao , Jinglai Li

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)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Tom Huix , Anna Korba , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

Variational inference has become a widely used method to approximate posteriors in complex latent variables models. However, deriving a variational inference algorithm generally requires significant model-specific analysis, and these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-01-03 Rajesh Ranganath , Sean Gerrish , David M. Blei

Amortized inference allows latent-variable models trained via variational learning to scale to large datasets. The quality of approximate inference is determined by two factors: a) the capacity of the variational distribution to match the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Chris Cremer , Xuechen Li , David Duvenaud

Modern learning systems increasingly rely on amortized learning - the idea of reusing computation or inductive biases shared across tasks to enable rapid generalization to novel problems. This principle spans a range of approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sarthak Mittal , Divyat Mahajan , Guillaume Lajoie , Mohammad Pezeshki

The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-06-12 Oskar Gustafsson , Mattias Villani

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a very successful generative model whose key element is the so called amortized inference network, which can perform test time inference using a single feed forward pass. Unfortunately, this comes at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li , Christopher De Sa , Sam Devlin , Cheng Zhang

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

Variational inference methods often focus on the problem of efficient model optimization, with little emphasis on the choice of the approximating posterior. In this paper, we review and implement the various methods that enable us to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-11 Siddhartha Saxena , Shibhansh Dohare , Jaivardhan Kapoor

We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

Neural posterior estimation has emerged as a powerful tool for amortized inference, with growing adoption across scientific and applied domains. In many of these applications, the conditioning variable is a set of observations whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Antoine Wehenkel , Michael Kagan , Lukas Heinrich , Chris Pollard

Inference amortization methods share information across multiple posterior-inference problems, allowing each to be carried out more efficiently. Generally, they require the inversion of the dependency structure in the generative model, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Stefan Webb , Adam Golinski , Robert Zinkov , N. Siddharth , Tom Rainforth , Yee Whye Teh , Frank Wood

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai , Hiroshi Mamitsuka

Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference over large data sets, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Stephan Mandt , James McInerney , Farhan Abrol , Rajesh Ranganath , David Blei

Sampling and Variational Inference (VI) are two large families of methods for approximate inference that have complementary strengths. Sampling methods excel at approximating arbitrary probability distributions, but can be inefficient. VI…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-07 Richard D. Lange , Ari Benjamin , Ralf M. Haefner , Xaq Pitkow