Related papers: Amortized Variational Inference: A Systematic Revi…
Stochastic models with global parameters and latent variables are common, and for which variational inference (VI) is popular. However, existing methods are often either slow or inaccurate in high dimensions. We suggest a fast and accurate…
In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…
Models with a large number of latent variables are often used to fully utilize the information in big or complex data. However, they can be difficult to estimate using standard approaches, and variational inference methods are a popular…
Adapting pretrained diffusion models to downstream objectives such as inverse problems often requires expensive test-time guidance or optimization. We propose a principled framework for generating high-quality reward-aligned samples at…
While Variational Inference (VI) is central to modern generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs), its pedagogical treatment is split across disciplines. In statistics, VI is typically framed…
Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…
A key advance in learning generative models is the use of amortized inference distributions that are jointly trained with the models. We find that existing training objectives for variational autoencoders can lead to inaccurate amortized…
This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
We propose a novel method, namely the accelerated mirror-prox (AMP) method, for computing the weak solutions of a class of deterministic and stochastic monotone variational inequalities (VI). The main idea of this algorithm is to…
Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…
Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…
To obtain uncertainty estimates with real-world Bayesian deep learning models, practical inference approximations are needed. Dropout variational inference (VI) for example has been used for machine vision and medical applications, but VI…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…
Amortized Bayesian inference (ABI) offers fast, scalable approximations to posterior densities by training neural surrogates on data simulated from the statistical model. However, ABI methods are highly sensitive to model misspecification:…
A key design constraint when implementing Monte Carlo and variational inference algorithms is that it must be possible to cheaply and exactly evaluate the marginal densities of proposal distributions and variational families. This takes…
In this work, we attempt to ameliorate the impact of data sparsity in the context of session-based recommendation. Specifically, we seek to devise a machine learning mechanism capable of extracting subtle and complex underlying temporal…