Related papers: Kernel Semi-Implicit Variational Inference
Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…
This paper proposes a novel parameter selection strategy for kernel-based gradient descent (KGD) algorithms, integrating bias-variance analysis with the splitting method. We introduce the concept of empirical effective dimension to quantify…
We exploit the observation that stochastic variational inference (SVI) is a form of annealing and present a modified SVI approach -- applicable to both large and small datasets -- that allows the amount of annealing done by SVI to be tuned.…
In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…
This paper proposes a novel kernel approach to linear dimension reduction for supervised learning. The purpose of the dimension reduction is to find directions in the input space to explain the output as effectively as possible. The…
Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…
We investigate nonparametric estimation of sliced inverse regression (SIR) via the $k$-nearest neighbors approach with a kernel. An estimator of the covariance matrix of the conditional expectation of the explanatory random vector given the…
Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…
Mutual information (MI) is an information-theoretic measure of dependency between two random variables. Several methods to estimate MI, from samples of two random variables with unknown underlying probability distributions have been…
Deep neural networks dominate modern machine learning, while alternative function approximators remain comparatively underexplored at scale. In this work, we revisit kernel methods as drop-in components for standard deep learning pipelines.…
For training an encoder network to perform amortized variational inference, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence from the exact posterior to its approximation, known as the inclusive or forward KL, is an increasingly popular choice of…
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…
Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…
Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…
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…
Leveraging well-established MCMC strategies, we propose MCMC-interactive variational inference (MIVI) to not only estimate the posterior in a time constrained manner, but also facilitate the design of MCMC transitions. Constructing a…
We introduce Group Spike-and-slab Variational Bayes (GSVB), a scalable method for group sparse regression. A fast co-ordinate ascent variational inference (CAVI) algorithm is developed for several common model families including Gaussian,…
Support vector machines (SVMs) are special kernel based methods and belong to the most successful learning methods since more than a decade. SVMs can informally be described as a kind of regularized M-estimators for functions and have…
We address the problem of model selection for Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. For fixed functional form of the kernel, model selection amounts to tuning kernel parameters and the slack penalty coefficient $C$. We begin by…