Related papers: Amortized Variational Inference: When and Why?
In this paper, we study two aspects of the variational autoencoder (VAE): the prior distribution over the latent variables and its corresponding posterior. First, we decompose the learning of VAEs into layerwise density estimation, and…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are expressive latent variable models that can be used to learn complex probability distributions from training data. However, the quality of the resulting model crucially relies on the expressiveness of the…
Stochastic variational inference offers an attractive option as a default method for differentiable probabilistic programming. However, the performance of the variational approach depends on the choice of an appropriate variational family.…
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…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been used extensively to discover low-dimensional latent factors governing neural activity and animal behavior. However, without careful model selection, the uncovered latent factors may reflect noise in…
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…
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…
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…
Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) aims to improve the generalisation of gradient-based learning by seeking out flat minima. In this work, we establish connections between SAM and Mean-Field Variational Inference (MFVI) of neural network…
Generalized Bayesian Inference (GBI) tempers a loss with a temperature $\beta > 0$ to mitigate overconfidence and improve robustness under model misspecification, but existing GBI methods typically rely on costly MCMC or SDE-based samplers…
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…
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…
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of variational inference in latent variable models for survival analysis, emphasizing the distinctive challenges associated with applying variational methods to survival data. We identify a…
Maximizing the log-likelihood is a crucial aspect of learning latent variable models, and variational inference (VI) stands as the commonly adopted method. However, VI can encounter challenges in achieving a high log-likelihood when dealing…
Despite the recent success in probabilistic modeling and their applications, generative models trained using traditional inference techniques struggle to adapt to new distributions, even when the target distribution may be closely related…
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)…
Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…
Predicting the distribution of outcomes under hypothetical interventions is crucial across healthcare, economics, and policy-making. However, existing methods often require restrictive assumptions, and are typically limited by the lack of…