Related papers: Forward $\chi^2$ Divergence Based Variational Impo…
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…
The framework of variational autoencoders (VAEs) provides a principled method for jointly learning latent-variable models and corresponding inference models. However, the main drawback of this approach is the blurriness of the generated…
Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…
We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…
In this note, we study the relationship between the variational gap and the variance of the (log) likelihood ratio. We show that the gap can be upper bounded by some form of dispersion measure of the likelihood ratio, which suggests the…
Ising models originated in statistical physics and are widely used in modeling spatial data and computer vision problems. However, statistical inference of this model remains challenging due to intractable nature of the normalizing constant…
Interactive visualizations are crucial in ad hoc data exploration and analysis. However, with the growing number of massive datasets, generating visualizations in interactive timescales is increasingly challenging. One approach for…
Variational Bayesian inference and (collapsed) Gibbs sampling are the two important classes of inference algorithms for Bayesian networks. Both have their advantages and disadvantages: collapsed Gibbs sampling is unbiased but is also…
This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of variational inference in latent variable models for survival analysis, emphasizing the distinctive challenges associated with applying variational methods to survival data. We identify a…
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…
We present a new approach to automatic amortized inference in universal probabilistic programs which improves performance compared to current methods. Our approach is a variation of inference compilation (IC) which leverages deep neural…
Logistic regression involving high-dimensional covariates is a practically important problem. Often the goal is variable selection, i.e., determining which few of the many covariates are associated with the binary response. Unfortunately,…
This paper describes an approach to simultaneously identify clusters and estimate cluster-specific regression parameters from the given data. Such an approach can be useful in learning the relationship between input and output when the…
Training deep generative models with maximum likelihood remains a challenge. The typical workaround is to use variational inference (VI) and maximize a lower bound to the log marginal likelihood of the data. Variational auto-encoders (VAEs)…
We present the Liouville Flow Importance Sampler (LFIS), an innovative flow-based model for generating samples from unnormalized density functions. LFIS learns a time-dependent velocity field that deterministically transports samples from a…
In variational inference (VI), the marginal log-likelihood is estimated using the standard evidence lower bound (ELBO), or improved versions as the importance weighted ELBO (IWELBO). We propose the multiple importance sampling ELBO…
Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular estimation method for Bayesian inference. However, most existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes their use in many important situations. Tran et…
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…
The substantial memory demands of pre-training and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) require memory-efficient optimization algorithms. One promising approach is layer-wise optimization, which treats each transformer block as a single…