Related papers: Rethinking Variational Inference for Probabilistic…

As the large amount of sequencing data accumulated in past decades and it is still accumulating, we need to handle the more and more sequencing data. As the fast development of the computing technologies, we now can handle a large amount of…

In this work, we propose a new particle-based variational inference (ParVI) method for accelerating the Energetic Variational Inference with Implicit scheme (EVI-Im) introduced in Ref. \cite{wang2021particle}. Inspired by energy…

Tackling pattern recognition problems in areas such as computer vision, bioinformatics, speech or text recognition is often done best by taking into account task-specific statistical relations between output variables. In structured…

Reasoning on large and complex real-world models is a computationally difficult task, yet one that is required for effective use of many AI applications. A plethora of inference algorithms have been developed that work well on specific…

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

In this paper, we propose CI-VI an efficient and scalable solver for semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI). Our method, first, maps SIVI's evidence lower bound (ELBO) to a form involving a nonlinear functional nesting of expected…

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…

We propose stepwise variational inference (VI) with vine copulas: a universal VI procedure that combines vine copulas with a novel stepwise estimation procedure of the variational parameters. Vine copulas consist of a nested sequence of…

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…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…

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)…

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…

This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has…

Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

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,…

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…

Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these…

Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

Machine learning predictions are increasingly used to supplement incomplete or costly-to-measure outcomes in fields such as biomedical research, environmental science, and social science. However, treating predictions as ground truth…