Related papers: Batch and match: black-box variational inference w…
We study the variational inference problem of minimizing a regularized R\'enyi divergence over an exponential family. We propose to solve this problem with a Bregman proximal gradient algorithm. We propose a sampling-based algorithm to…
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 study batch normalisation in the context of variational inference methods in Bayesian neural networks, such as mean-field or MC Dropout. We show that batch-normalisation does not affect the optimum of the evidence lower bound (ELBO).…
For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…
Black-box optimization problems often require simultaneously optimizing different types of variables, such as continuous, integer, and categorical variables. Unlike integer variables, categorical variables do not necessarily have a…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…
We present a Gaussian Variational Inference (GVI) technique that can be applied to large-scale nonlinear batch state estimation problems. The main contribution is to show how to fit both the mean and (inverse) covariance of a Gaussian to…
Current variational inference methods for hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric models can neither characterize the correlation structure among latent variables due to the mean-field setting, nor infer the true posterior dimension because of…
In stochastic variational inference, the variational Bayes objective function is optimized using stochastic gradient approximation, where gradients computed on small random subsets of data are used to approximate the true gradient over the…
Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…
Stochastic gradient descent-based algorithms are widely used for training deep neural networks but often suffer from slow convergence. To address the challenge, we leverage the framework of the alternating direction method of multipliers…
We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…
The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…
Variational families with full-rank covariance approximations are known not to work well in black-box variational inference (BBVI), both empirically and theoretically. In fact, recent computational complexity results for BBVI have…
Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables Bayesian analysis when the likelihood is intractable but model simulations are available. Recent advances in statistics and machine learning, including Approximate Bayesian Computation and deep…
Black box variational inference allows researchers to easily prototype and evaluate an array of models. Recent advances allow such algorithms to scale to high dimensions. However, a central question remains: How to specify an expressive…
Modern neural network architectures have achieved remarkable accuracies but remain highly dependent on their training data, often lacking interpretability in their learned mappings. While effective on large datasets, they tend to overfit on…
We deal with the efficient parallelization of Bayesian global optimization algorithms, and more specifically of those based on the expected improvement criterion and its variants. A closed form formula relying on multivariate Gaussian…