Related papers: Forward $\chi^2$ Divergence Based Variational Impo…
This paper is concerned with Bayesian inference when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We propose an annealed importance sampling procedure for estimating expectations with respect to the posterior.…
How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
Recently, a series of papers proposed deep learning-based approaches to sample from target distributions using controlled diffusion processes, being trained only on the unnormalized target densities without access to samples. Building on…
Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the…
Estimating the importance of variables is an essential task in modern machine learning. This help to evaluate the goodness of a feature in a given model. Several techniques for estimating the importance of variables have been developed…
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…
Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…
Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are popular deep latent variable models which are trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). To obtain tighter ELBO and hence better variational approximations, it has been proposed to use…
Combining the increasing availability and abundance of healthcare data and the current advances in machine learning methods have created renewed opportunities to improve clinical decision support systems. However, in healthcare risk…
Zero-shot diffusion posterior sampling offers a flexible framework for inverse problems by accommodating arbitrary degradation operators at test time, but incurs high computational cost due to repeated likelihood-guided updates. In…
In this paper, we propose an efficient importance sampling algorithm for rare event simulation under copula models. In the algorithm, the derived optimal probability measure is based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of the…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, demonstrating unprecedented capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. However, the high costs associated with such exceptional performance limit the…
Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…
We study the problem of statistically certifying viable initial sets (VISs) -- sets of initial conditions whose trajectories satisfy a given control specification. While VISs can be obtained from model-based methods, these methods typically…
We propose Learned Accept/Reject Sampling (LARS), a method for constructing richer priors using rejection sampling with a learned acceptance function. This work is motivated by recent analyses of the VAE objective, which pointed out that…
Generalized linear models (GLMs) are fundamental tools for statistical modeling, with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) serving as the classical approach for parameter inference. While MLE performs well for canonical GLMs, it can become…
We propose a fast and theoretically grounded method for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging in latent variable regression models. Our framework addresses three interrelated challenges: (i) intractable marginal likelihoods, (ii)…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo methodology for the approximation of intractable integrals, very often involving a target probability density function. The performance of IS heavily depends on the appropriate selection of…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…