Related papers: Particle Semi-Implicit Variational Inference

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…

Stein variational inference (SVI) is a sample-based approximate Bayesian inference technique that generates a sample set by jointly optimizing the samples' locations to minimize an information-theoretic measure of discrepancy with the…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

The recently developed Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods drive the empirical distribution of a set of \emph{fixed-weight} particles towards a given target distribution $\pi$ by iteratively updating particles' positions.…

We propose Diffusion Model Variational Inference (DMVI), a novel method for automated approximate inference in probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). DMVI utilizes diffusion models as variational approximations to the true posterior…

Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…

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…

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 present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…

Reconstructing the evolutionary history relating a collection of molecular sequences is the main subject of modern Bayesian phylogenetic inference. However, the commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be inefficient due to the…

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…

Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is…

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…

Future wireless networks are envisioned to provide ubiquitous sensing services, which also gives rise to a substantial demand for high-dimensional non-convex parameter estimation, i.e., the associated likelihood function is non-convex and…

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) constructs approximate posteriors of the form $q(\theta) = \int k(\theta | z) r(dz)$, where the conditional kernel is parameterized and the mixing base is fixed and tractable. This paper develops a…

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…

A reward-guided, gradient-free ParVI method, \textit{R-ParVI}, is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant). R-ParVI formulates the sampling problem as particle flow driven by rewards: particles are drawn from…

Mixture variational distributions in black box variational inference (BBVI) have demonstrated impressive results in challenging density estimation tasks. However, currently scaling the number of mixture components can lead to a linear…