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A reward-guided, gradient-free ParVI method, \textit{R-ParVI}, is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant). R-ParVI formulates the sampling problem as particle flow driven by rewards: particles are drawn from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yongchao Huang

Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Justin Domke , Daniel Sheldon

Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm for hidden Markov models, in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-08 Pengyu Wang , Phil Blunsom

Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-03 Dingbo Wu , Fangzheng Xie

Multivariate data analysis techniques have the potential to improve physics analyses in many ways. The common classification problem of signal/background discrimination is one example. The Support Vector Machine learning algorithm is a…

High Energy Physics - Experiment · Physics 2009-11-07 A. Vaiciulis

Real-world decision-making problems often involve decision-dependent uncertainty, where the probability distribution of the random vector depends on the model decisions. Few studies focus on two-stage stochastic programs with this type of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Maria Bazotte , Margarida Carvalho , Thibaut Vidal

Like many optimization algorithms, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) is sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. If the learning rate is too small, the optimization process may be slow, and the algorithm might get stuck in local…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Maximilian Dinkel , Gil Robalo Rei , Wolfgang A. Wall

Bayesian statistical inference loses predictive optimality when generative models are misspecified. Working within an existing coherent loss-based generalisation of Bayesian inference, we show existing Modular/Cut-model inference is…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-18 Chris U. Carmona , Geoff K. Nicholls

While Variational Inference (VI) is central to modern generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs), its pedagogical treatment is split across disciplines. In statistics, VI is typically framed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-22 Yen-Chi Chen

In this work we study binary classification problems where we assume that our training data is subject to uncertainty, i.e. the precise data points are not known. To tackle this issue in the field of robust machine learning the aim is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Jannis Kurtz

Structured variational inference constitutes a core methodology in modern statistical applications. Unlike mean-field variational inference, the approximate posterior is assumed to have interdependent structure. We consider the natural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-14 Shunan Sheng , Bohan Wu , Bennett Zhu , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

Instrumental variables (IVs), sources of treatment randomization that are conditionally independent of the outcome, play an important role in causal inference with unobserved confounders. However, the existing IV-based counterfactual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-14 Junkun Yuan , Anpeng Wu , Kun Kuang , Bo Li , Runze Wu , Fei Wu , Lanfen Lin

To infer a function value on a specific point $x$, it is essential to assign higher weights to the points closer to $x$, which is called local polynomial / multivariable regression. In many practical cases, a limited sample size may ruin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-30 Yanwu Gu , Dong Xia

Support Vector Machines (SVM), a popular machine learning technique, has been applied to a wide range of domains such as science, finance, and social networks for supervised learning. Whether it is identifying high-risk patients by…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2014-06-20 Jeyanthi Narasimhan , Abhinav Vishnu , Lawrence Holder , Adolfy Hoisie

Autoregressive (AR) decoding is a major latency bottleneck for large language models. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates AR by letting a drafter propose multi-token blocks that a verifier accepts or rejects. However, many SD systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Shrenik Bhansali , Larry Heck

We provide a general framework for the stability of solutions to stochastic partial differential equations with respect to perturbations of the drift. More precisely, we consider stochastic partial differential equations with drift given as…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2016-02-03 Benjamin Gess , Jonas M. Tölle

We develop a stochastic algorithm for independent component analysis that incorporates multi-trial supervision, which is available in many scientific contexts. The method blends a proximal gradient-type algorithm in the space of invertible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Ronak Mehta , Mateus Piovezan Otto , Noah Stanis , Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad , Zaid Harchaoui

Joint utilization of multiple discrete frequency bands can enhance the accuracy of delay estimation. Although some unique challenges of multiband fusion, such as phase distortion, oscillation phenomena, and high-dimensional search, have…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-09 Zhixiang Hu , An Liu , Minjian Zhao

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is a useful tool for efficiently learning probabilistic models in machine learning. Generally approximate posteriors learned by ADVI are forced to be unimodal in order to facilitate use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Warren R. Morningstar , Sharad M. Vikram , Cusuh Ham , Andrew Gallagher , Joshua V. Dillon

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hippolyte Labarrière , Cesare Molinari , Silvia Villa , Lorenzo Rosasco