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Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is an approach to statistical inference where simulations from an assumed model are used to construct estimators and confidence sets. SBI is often used when the likelihood is intractable and to construct…
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…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…
Stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) model a large class of equilibrium problems subject to data uncertainty, and are closely related to stochastic optimization problems. The SVI solution is usually estimated by a solution to a sample…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enhances the expressiveness of variational families through hierarchical semi-implicit distributions, but the intractability of their densities makes standard ELBO-based optimization biased. Recent…
We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
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…
Seismic tomography is a methodology to image the interior of solid or fluid media, and is often used to map properties in the subsurface of the Earth. In order to better interpret the resulting images it is important to assess imaging…
Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…
Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…
Accurate calibration of stochastic agent-based models (ABMs) in epidemiology is crucial to make them useful in public health policy decisions and interventions. Traditional calibration methods, e.g., Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), that…
Rare event simulation and rare event probability estimation are important tasks within the analysis of systems subject to uncertainty and randomness. Simultaneously, accurately estimating rare event probabilities is an inherently difficult…
In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
Variational inference (VI) is a central tool in modern machine learning, used to approximate an intractable target density by optimising over a tractable family of distributions. As the variational family cannot typically represent the…