Related papers: Extending Mean-Field Variational Inference via Ent…
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…
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…
Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
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,…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
Efficiently accessing the information contained in non-linear and high dimensional probability distributions remains a core challenge in modern statistics. Traditionally, estimators that go beyond point estimates are either categorized as…
Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…
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)…
Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
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)…
Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…
Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…
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…
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…
This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has…
In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…