Related papers: A Trust-Region Method for Graphical Stein Variatio…

Stochastic variational inference allows for fast posterior inference in complex Bayesian models. However, the algorithm is prone to local optima which can make the quality of the posterior approximation sensitive to the choice of…

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…

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…

Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…

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.…

Simulation-based inference (SBI) is a method to perform inference on a variety of complex scientific models with challenging inference (inverse) problems. Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design (BOED) aims to efficiently use experimental…

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…

We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…

We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of…

We propose and analyze a Stein variational reduced basis method (SVRB) to solve large-scale PDE-constrained Bayesian inverse problems. To address the computational challenge of drawing numerous samples requiring expensive PDE solves from…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…

Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

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…

We propose a novel algorithm, TR-SVR, for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. This method builds on the trust-region framework, which effectively balances local and global exploration in optimization tasks. TR-SVR…

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods tackle complex scientific models with challenging inverse problems. However, SBI models often face a significant hurdle due to their non-differentiable nature, which hampers the use of gradient-based…

Probabilistic state estimation is essential for robots navigating uncertain environments. Accurately and efficiently managing uncertainty in estimated states is key to robust robotic operation. However, nonlinearities in robotic platforms…