Related papers: Variational Inference with Gaussian Score Matching
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family 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)…
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)…
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…
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…
Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…
Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…
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…
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,…
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) 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…
Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…
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…
The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…
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…
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…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) greatly enriches the expressiveness of variational families by considering implicit variational distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. However, due to the intractable densities of…
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…
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…
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…