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Machine learning methods for computational imaging require uncertainty estimation to be reliable in real settings. While Bayesian models offer a computationally tractable way of recovering uncertainty, they need large data volumes to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Francesco Tonolini , Jack Radford , Alex Turpin , Daniele Faccio , Roderick Murray-Smith

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

Inverse problems involving partial differential equations (PDEs) are widely used in science and engineering. Although such problems are generally ill-posed, different regularisation approaches have been developed to ameliorate this problem.…

Applications · Statistics 2022-03-23 Jan Povala , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Eky Febrianto , Fehmi Cirak , Mark Girolami

Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-26 Geetakrishnasai Gunapati , Anirudh Jain , P. K. Srijith , Shantanu Desai

Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-03 Dingbo Wu , Fangzheng Xie

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-19 Yuling Yao , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Martin Magris , Mostafa Shabani , Alexandros Iosifidis

One of the most common machine learning setups is logistic regression. In many classification models, including neural networks, the final prediction is obtained by applying a logistic link function to a linear score. In binary logistic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-24 Avrajit Ghosh , Bin Yu , Manfred Warmuth , Peter Bartlett

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-04 Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Michalis K. Titsias , David M. Blei

Contrastive learning has become a key component of self-supervised learning approaches for graph-structured data. Despite their success, existing graph contrastive learning methods are incapable of uncertainty quantification for node…

Detecting anomalies is one fundamental aspect of a safety-critical software system, however, it remains a long-standing problem. Numerous branches of works have been proposed to alleviate the complication and have demonstrated their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Hyunsoo Cho , Jinseok Seol , Sang-goo Lee

Self-supervised learning is a machine learning approach that generates implicit labels by learning underlined patterns and extracting discriminative features from unlabeled data without manual labelling. Contrastive learning introduces the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Asifullah Khan , Laiba Asmatullah , Anza Malik , Shahzaib Khan , Hamna Asif

Causal inference, especially in observational studies, relies on untestable assumptions about the true data-generating process. Sensitivity analysis helps us determine how robust our conclusions are when we alter these underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Nikita Dhawan , Daniel Shen , Leonardo Cotta , Chris J. Maddison

Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Bayesian posterior inference. Though popular, VB comes with few theoretical guarantees, most of which focus on well-specified models. However, models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-13 Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Parth Paritosh , Nikolay Atanasov , Sonia Martinez

We propose algorithms for conducting Bayesian inference in structural vector autoregressions identified using sign restrictions. The key feature of our approach is a sampling step based on 'soft' sign restrictions. This step draws from a…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-31 Matthew Read , Dan Zhu

Mean-field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is an approximate Bayesian posterior inference technique that is increasingly popular due to its fast runtimes on large-scale datasets. However, even when MFVB provides accurate posterior means for…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-18 Ryan Giordano , Tamara Broderick , Michael I. Jordan

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Yun Yang , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya

Variational inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-14 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Wu Lin