Related papers: Linear Convergence of Black-Box Variational Infere…
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,…
Understanding the gradient variance of black-box variational inference (BBVI) is a crucial step for establishing its convergence and developing algorithmic improvements. However, existing studies have yet to show that the gradient variance…
We prove that, given a mean-field location-scale variational family, black-box variational inference (BBVI) with the reparametrization gradient converges at a rate that is nearly independent of explicit dimension dependence. Specifically,…
Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…
Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…
Black-box variational inference is widely used in situations where there is no proof that its stochastic optimization succeeds. We suggest this is due to a theoretical gap in existing stochastic optimization proofs: namely the challenge of…
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…
Variational families with full-rank covariance approximations are known not to work well in black-box variational inference (BBVI), both empirically and theoretically. In fact, recent computational complexity results for BBVI have…
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…
Continuous latent time series models are prevalent in Bayesian modeling; examples include the Kalman filter, dynamic collaborative filtering, or dynamic topic models. These models often benefit from structured, non mean field variational…
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…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
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…
We formalize an equivalence between two popular methods for Bayesian inference: Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and black-box variational inference (BBVI). In particular, we show that BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when the…
Black-box variational inference tries to approximate a complex target distribution though a gradient-based optimization of the parameters of a simpler distribution. Provable convergence guarantees require structural properties of the…
For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…
Automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI) offers fast and easy-to-use posterior approximation in multiple modern probabilistic programming languages. However, its stochastic optimizer lacks clear convergence criteria and…
Recent variational inference methods use stochastic gradient estimators whose variance is not well understood. Theoretical guarantees for these estimators are important to understand when these methods will or will not work. This paper…
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 consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…