English
Related papers

Related papers: Rethinking Variational Inference for Probabilistic…

200 papers

Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) provide a robust paradigm for Bayesian deep learning. In DGPs, a set of sparse integration locations called inducing points are selected to approximate the posterior distribution of the model. This is done to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Jian Xu , Delu Zeng , John Paisley

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-29 Amar Shah , David A. Knowles , Zoubin Ghahramani

The differential stochastic variational inequality with parametric convex optimization (DSVI-O) is an ordinary differential equation whose right-hand side involves a stochastic variational inequality and solutions of several dynamic and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Xiaojun Chen , Jian Guo , Guan Wang

We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-19 Dmitry Molchanov , Valery Kharitonov , Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

Sampling and Variational Inference (VI) are two large families of methods for approximate inference that have complementary strengths. Sampling methods excel at approximating arbitrary probability distributions, but can be inefficient. VI…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-07 Richard D. Lange , Ari Benjamin , Ralf M. Haefner , Xaq Pitkow

Statistical models are central to machine learning with broad applicability across a range of downstream tasks. The models are controlled by free parameters that are typically estimated from data by maximum-likelihood estimation or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Vaidotas Simkus , Benjamin Rhodes , Michael U. Gutmann

A new variational inference method, SPH-ParVI, based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant) or sampling using gradients. SPH-ParVI simulates the flow of a fluid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Yongchao Huang

The abundance of modern health data provides many opportunities for the use of machine learning techniques to build better statistical models to improve clinical decision making. Predicting time-to-event distributions, also known as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-15 Zidi Xiu , Chenyang Tao , Benjamin A. Goldstein , Ricardo Henao

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-16 Jen Ning Lim , Adam M. Johansen

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Heiko Zimmermann , Hao Wu , Babak Esmaeili , Jan-Willem van de Meent

The stochastic variational inference (SVI) paradigm, which combines variational inference, natural gradients, and stochastic updates, was recently proposed for large-scale data analysis in conjugate Bayesian models and demonstrated to be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-05 Rishit Sheth , Roni Khardon

Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) enable expressive hierarchical Bayesian modeling but pose substantial challenges for posterior inference, especially over inducing variables. Denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI) addresses this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Jian Xu , Qibin Zhao , John Paisley , Delu Zeng

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Lucas Kock , Scott A. Sisson , G. S. Rodrigues , David J. Nott

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Chunlin Ji , Haige Shen

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Mingzhang Yin , Y. X. Rachel Wang , Purnamrita Sarkar

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-16 Saad Mohamad , Abdelhamid Bouchachia , Moamar Sayed-Mouchaweh

Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba-…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-01 Qiang Liu , Yihao Feng

Variational Inference (VI) is a commonly used technique for approximate Bayesian inference and uncertainty estimation in deep learning models, yet it comes at a computational cost, as it doubles the number of trainable parameters to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Christian Marius Lillelund , Martin Magris , Christian Fischer Pedersen