Related papers: Batch and match: black-box variational inference w…
Extending Bayesian optimization to batch evaluation can enable the designer to make the most use of parallel computing technology. However, most of current batch approaches do not scale well with the batch size. That is, their performances…
In Bayesian inference, an unknown measurement uncertainty is often quantified in terms of a Gamma distributed precision parameter, which is impractical when prior information on the standard deviation of the measurement uncertainty shall be…
Many leading self-supervised methods for unsupervised representation learning, in particular those for embedding image features, are built on variants of the instance discrimination task, whose optimization is known to be prone to…
Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…
Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…
We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of…
In this paper we propose BVAR-connect, a variational inference approach to a Bayesian multi-subject vector autoregressive (VAR) model for inference on effective brain connectivity based on resting-state functional MRI data. The modeling…
The multi-armed bandits (MAB) framework is a widely used approach for sequential decision-making, where a decision-maker selects an arm in each round with the goal of maximizing long-term rewards. In many practical applications, such as…
Latent variable time-series models are among the most heavily used tools from machine learning and applied statistics. These models have the advantage of learning latent structure both from noisy observations and from the temporal ordering…
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)…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…
Black-box variational inference is widely used in situations where there is no proof that its stochastic optimization succeeds. We suggest this is due to a theoretical gap in existing stochastic optimization proofs: namely the challenge of…
Score matching (SM) provides a compelling approach to learn energy-based models (EBMs) by avoiding the calculation of partition function. However, it remains largely open to learn energy-based latent variable models (EBLVMs), except some…
Constructing prediction sets with coverage guarantees for unobserved outcomes is a core problem in modern statistics. Methods for predictive inference have been developed for a wide range of settings, but usually only consider test data…
Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding has recently gained renewed attention in text generation. MBR decoding considers texts sampled from a model as pseudo-references and selects the text with the highest similarity to the others. Therefore,…
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…
Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…