Related papers: Learning with Importance Weighted Variational Infe…
This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth…
We present Quantized Variational Inference, a new algorithm for Evidence Lower Bound maximization. We show how Optimal Voronoi Tesselation produces variance free gradients for ELBO optimization at the cost of introducing asymptotically…
Global Neuron Importance Estimation is used to prune neural networks for efficiency reasons. To determine the global importance of each neuron or convolutional kernel, most of the existing methods either use activation or gradient…
The surrogate loss of variational autoencoders (VAEs) poses various challenges to their training, inducing the imbalance between task fitting and representation inference. To avert this, the existing strategies for VAEs focus on adjusting…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
In the rapidly evolving domain of electrical power systems, the Volt-VAR optimization (VVO) is increasingly critical, especially with the burgeoning integration of renewable energy sources. Traditional approaches to learning-based VVO in…
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…
We show that the gradient estimates used in training Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) with importance-weighted variational inference are susceptible to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) issues. Specifically, we show both theoretically and via an…
We revisit the theory of importance weighted variational inference (IWVI), a promising strategy for learning latent variable models. IWVI uses new variational bounds, known as Monte Carlo objectives (MCOs), obtained by replacing intractable…
Reparameterization (RP) and likelihood ratio (LR) gradient estimators are used to estimate gradients of expectations throughout machine learning and reinforcement learning; however, they are usually explained as simple mathematical tricks,…
As opaque black-box predictive models become more prevalent, the need to develop interpretations for these models is of great interest. The concept of variable importance and Shapley values are interpretability measures that applies to any…
In this paper we propose two novel bounds for the log-likelihood based on Kullback-Leibler and the R\'{e}nyi divergences, which can be used for variational inference and in particular for the training of Variational AutoEncoders. Our…
Variational Inference (VI) provides a scalable framework for Bayesian inference by optimizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), but convergence analysis remains challenging due to the objective's non-convexity and non-smoothness in Euclidean…
For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…
We analyse the properties of an unbiased gradient estimator of the ELBO for variational inference, based on the score function method with leave-one-out control variates. We show that this gradient estimator can be obtained using a new…
Multimodal learning with variational autoencoders (VAEs) requires estimating joint distributions to evaluate the evidence lower bound (ELBO). Current methods, the product and mixture of experts, aggregate single-modality distributions…
We propose a variational autoencoder (VAE) approach for parameter estimation in nonlinear mixed-effects models based on ordinary differential equations (NLME-ODEs) using longitudinal data from multiple subjects. In moderate dimensions,…
We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…
We propose an analytical solution for approximating the gradient of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) in variational inference problems where the statistical model is a Bayesian network consisting of observations drawn from a mixture of a…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…