Related papers: Black Box Variational Inference with a Determinist…
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…
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of…
Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) with Gaussian mixture families offers a flexible approach for approximating complex posterior distributions without requiring gradients of the target density. However, standard numerical optimization…
Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high-dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework…
We develop EigenVI, an eigenvalue-based approach for black-box variational inference (BBVI). EigenVI constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions. For distributions over $\mathbb{R}^D$, the lowest order term…
In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…
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…
Recent studies on inverse problems have proposed posterior samplers that leverage the pre-trained diffusion models as powerful priors. These attempts have paved the way for using diffusion models in a wide range of inverse problems.…
We propose a black-box algorithm called {\it Adversarial Variational Inference and Learning} (AdVIL) to perform inference and learning on a general Markov random field (MRF). AdVIL employs two variational distributions to approximately…
We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It…
Most leading implementations of black-box variational inference (BBVI) are based on optimizing a stochastic evidence lower bound (ELBO). But such approaches to BBVI often converge slowly due to the high variance of their gradient estimates…
Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…
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…
We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…