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Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a common name for an emerging family of approaches that infer the model parameters when the likelihood is intractable. Existing SBI methods either approximate the likelihood, such as Approximate Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Theo Gruner , Boris Belousov , Fabio Muratore , Daniel Palenicek , Jan Peters

Stochastic Natural Gradient Variational Inference (NGVI) is a widely used method for approximating posterior distribution in probabilistic models. Despite its empirical success and foundational role in variational inference, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Fangyuan Sun , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-26 Yash Patel , Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier , Ambuj Tewari

We introduce a class of generic spike-and-slab priors for high-dimensional linear regression with grouped variables and present a Coordinate-ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for obtaining an optimal variational Bayes…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-02 Buyu Lin , Changhao Ge , Jun S. Liu

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

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

Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods approximate the target distribution by iteratively evolving finite weighted particle systems. Recent advances of ParVI methods reveal the benefits of accelerated position update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Fangyikang Wang , Huminhao Zhu , Chao Zhang , Hanbin Zhao , Hui Qian

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

Nonparametric regression models with locally stationary covariates have received increasing interest in recent years. As a nice relief of "curse of dimensionality" induced by large dimension of covariates, additive regression model is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-12-02 Lixia Hu , Tao Huang , Jinhong You

Structured additive distributional regression models offer a versatile framework for estimating complete conditional distributions by relating all parameters of a parametric distribution to covariates. Although these models efficiently…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-14 Jana Kleinemeier , Nadja Klein

Approximate inference in high-dimensional, discrete probabilistic models is a central problem in computational statistics and machine learning. This paper describes discrete particle variational inference (DPVI), a new approach that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-08 Ardavan Saeedi , Tejas D Kulkarni , Vikash Mansinghka , Samuel Gershman

Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-25 Yoon Kim , Sam Wiseman , Andrew C. Miller , David Sontag , Alexander M. Rush

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Wasu Top Piriyakulkij , Yingheng Wang , Volodymyr Kuleshov

Recent studies on inverse problems have proposed posterior samplers that leverage the pre-trained diffusion models as powerful priors. These attempts have paved the way for using diffusion models in a wide range of inverse problems.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Sojin Lee , Dogyun Park , Inho Kong , Hyunwoo J. Kim

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Qiang Du , Kaizheng Wang , Edith Zhang , Chenyang Zhong

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-16 Jen Ning Lim , Adam M. Johansen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-29 Laurence Aitchison , Vincent Adam , Srinivas C. Turaga

Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have gained attention in the Bayesian inference literature, for their capacity to yield flexible and accurate approximations. We explore ParVIs from the perspective of Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-17 Chang Liu , Jingwei Zhuo , Pengyu Cheng , Ruiyi Zhang , Jun Zhu , Lawrence Carin

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai