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Related papers: Brain-like Variational Inference

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Sequential Bayesian inference over predictive functions is a natural framework for continual learning from streams of data. However, applying it to neural networks has proved challenging in practice. Addressing the drawbacks of existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Freddie Bickford Smith , Qixuan Feng , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal

Multimodal learning enhances the perceptual capabilities of cognitive systems by integrating information from different sensory modalities. However, existing multimodal fusion research typically assumes static integration, not fully…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Xiang He , Dongcheng Zhao , Yang Li , Qingqun Kong , Xin Yang , Yi Zeng

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-05 Amir Dib

The Bayesian view of the brain hypothesizes that the brain constructs a generative model of the world, and uses it to make inferences via Bayes' rule. Although many types of approximate inference schemes have been proposed for hierarchical…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-11-15 Shashwat Shukla , Hideaki Shimazaki , Udayan Ganguly

Binary Neural Networks (BiNNs), which employ single-bit precision weights, have emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory usage and power consumption while maintaining competitive performance in large-scale systems. However, training…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-11-18 Luca Nepote , Alix Lhéritier , Nicolas Bondoux , Marios Kountouris , Maurizio Filippone

Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a flexible and general approach to performing Bayesian inference: In SBI, a neural network is trained on synthetic data simulated from a model and used to rapidly infer posterior distributions for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Julius Vetter , Manuel Gloeckler , Daniel Gedon , Jakob H. Macke

Coordinate ascent variational inference is an important algorithm for inference in probabilistic models, but it is slow because it updates only a single variable at a time. Block coordinate methods perform inference faster by updating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Neal Lawton , Aram Galstyan , Greg Ver Steeg

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-07 Tom Rainforth , Adam R. Kosiorek , Tuan Anh Le , Chris J. Maddison , Maximilian Igl , Frank Wood , Yee Whye Teh

Traditional neural networks are simple to train but they typically produce overconfident predictions. In contrast, Bayesian neural networks provide good uncertainty quantification but optimizing them is time consuming due to the large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

Disentanglement learning aims to construct independent and interpretable latent variables in which generative models are a popular strategy. InfoGAN is a classic method via maximizing Mutual Information (MI) to obtain interpretable latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Hongxiang Jiang , Jihao Yin , Xiaoyan Luo , Fuxiang Wang

Physical AI agents, such as robots and other embodied systems operating under tight and fluctuating resource constraints, remain far less capable than biological agents in open-ended real-world environments. This paper argues that Active…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-24 Bert de Vries

Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) seeks experiments that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) in model parameters. Directly estimating the EIG using nested Monte Carlo is computationally expensive and requires an explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Jiayuan Dong , Christian Jacobsen , Mehdi Khalloufi , Maryam Akram , Wanjiao Liu , Karthik Duraisamy , Xun Huan

Spectral bias, the tendency of neural networks to learn low-frequency features first, is a well-known issue with many training algorithms for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). To overcome this issue, we propose IFeF-PINN, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Yulun Wu , Miguel Aguiar , Karl H. Johansson , Matthieu Barreau

Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational distribution.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Guoqing Zheng , Yiming Yang , Jaime Carbonell

Humans excel at continually acquiring, consolidating, and retaining information from an ever-changing environment, whereas artificial neural networks (ANNs) exhibit catastrophic forgetting. There are considerable differences in the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Fahad Sarfraz , Elahe Arani , Bahram Zonooz

Why do brains and deep networks converge on similar representations? Task-optimized artificial neural networks quantitatively predict primate ventral stream responses despite radically different substrates and optimization dynamics. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Christian Dittrich , Jennifer Flygare Kinne

Identifiability, or recovery of the true latent representations from which the observed data originates, is de facto a fundamental goal of representation learning. Yet, most deep generative models do not address the question of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Shen Li , Bryan Hooi , Gim Hee Lee

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models hold significant promise for universal Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). However, existing approaches often rely on end-to-end fine-tuning and exhibit limited efficacy under frozen-probing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Jiquan Wang , Sha Zhao , Yangxuan Zhou , Yiming Kang , Shijian Li , Gang Pan

Branching Time Active Inference (Champion et al., 2021b,a) is a framework proposing to look at planning as a form of Bayesian model expansion. Its root can be found in Active Inference (Friston et al., 2016; Da Costa et al., 2020; Champion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Théophile Champion , Marek Grześ , Howard Bowman

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Minyoung Kim , Vladimir Pavlovic