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We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kian Ming A. Chai , Edwin V. Bonilla

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

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

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

We propose a novel approach to perform approximate Bayesian inference in complex models such as Bayesian neural networks. The approach is more scalable to large data than Markov Chain Monte Carlo, it embraces more expressive models than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-07 Joel Janek Dabrowski , Daniel Edward Pagendam

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Felix Leibfried

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Yingzhi Xia , Qifeng Liao , Jinglai Li

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

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)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

Variational Bayesian posterior inference often requires simplifying approximations such as mean-field parametrisation to ensure tractability. However, prior work has associated the variational mean-field approximation for Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Richard Kurle , Ralf Herbrich , Tim Januschowski , Yuyang Wang , Jan Gasthaus

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier

Bayesian deep learning plays an important role especially for its ability evaluating epistemic uncertainty (EU). Due to computational complexity issues, approximation methods such as variational inference (VI) have been used in practice to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Futoshi Futami , Tomoharu Iwata , Naonori Ueda , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a framework for Bayesian inference that can offer principled uncertainty estimates for a large range of problems. For example, if we consider regression problems with Gaussian likelihoods, a GP model enjoys…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Felix Leibfried , Vincent Dutordoir , ST John , Nicolas Durrande

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Diederik P Kingma , Max Welling

We propose a new approach to Bayesian prediction that caters for models with a large number of parameters and is robust to model misspecification. Given a class of high-dimensional (but parametric) predictive models, this new approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-13 David T. Frazier , Ruben Loaiza-Maya , Gael M. Martin , Bonsoo Koo

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jens Sjölund

Some machine learning applications require continual learning - where data comes in a sequence of datasets, each is used for training and then permanently discarded. From a Bayesian perspective, continual learning seems straightforward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-19 Sebastian Farquhar , Yarin Gal

Bayesian methods have shown success in deep learning applications. For example, in predictive tasks, Bayesian neural networks leverage Bayesian reasoning of model uncertainty to improve the reliability and uncertainty awareness of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Wenlong Chen , Bolian Li , Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li