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Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…
Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…
We introduce a class of generic spike-and-slab priors for high-dimensional linear regression with grouped variables and present a Coordinate-ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for obtaining an optimal variational Bayes…
In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…
We propose an optimization algorithm for Variational Inference (VI) in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates where the variational space is a Riemann manifold. We develop an efficient algorithm for Gaussian…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…
Heterogeneous, mixed type datasets including both continuous and categorical variables are ubiquitous, and enriches data analysis by allowing for more complex relationships and interactions to be modelled. Mixture models offer a flexible…
Over-parameterized models, such as DeepNets and ConvNets, form a class of models that are routinely adopted in a wide variety of applications, and for which Bayesian inference is desirable but extremely challenging. Variational inference…
The key to VI is the selection of a tractable density to approximate the Bayesian posterior. For large and complex models a common choice is to assume independence between multivariate blocks in a partition of the parameter space. While…
Bayesian models provide a framework for probabilistic modelling of complex datasets. However, many of such models are computationally demanding especially in the presence of large datasets. On the other hand, in sensor network applications,…
In binary-transaction data-mining, traditional frequent itemset mining often produces results which are not straightforward to interpret. To overcome this problem, probability models are often used to produce more compact and conclusive…
Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…
Variational Inference makes a trade-off between the capacity of the variational family and the tractability of finding an approximate posterior distribution. Instead, Boosting Variational Inference allows practitioners to obtain…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. It has been empirically observed that MFVI optimizers often suffer from mode collapse.…
Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…
Denoising diffusion models have driven significant progress in the field of Bayesian inverse problems. Recent approaches use pre-trained diffusion models as priors to solve a wide range of such problems, only leveraging inference-time…
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…
Decision trees remain one of the most popular machine learning models today, largely due to their out-of-the-box performance and interpretability. In this work, we present a Bayesian approach to decision tree induction via maximum a…
In Bayesian phylogenetics, our goal is to estimate the posterior distribution over phylogenetic trees. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are widely used to approximate the phylogenetic posterior distributions. For large-scale sequence data,…
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…