Related papers: ELBOing Stein: Variational Bayes with Stein Mixtur…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to simulation optimization, stochastic programming, and online M-estimation, where sampling effort is a decision variable. We study the mini-batch gradient noise as a sampling-design object.…
State estimation in robotic systems presents significant challenges, particularly due to the prevalence of multimodal posterior distributions in real-world scenarios. One effective strategy for handling such complexity is to compute maximum…
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…
Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
This work introduces a new method for selecting the number of components in finite mixture models (FMMs) using variational Bayes, inspired by the large-sample properties of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) derived from mean-field (MF)…
Bayesian inference was once a gold standard for learning with neural networks, providing accurate full predictive distributions and well calibrated uncertainty. However, scaling Bayesian inference techniques to deep neural networks is…
Distribution matching is central to many vision and graphics tasks, where the widely used Wasserstein distance is too costly to compute for high dimensional distributions. The Sliced Wasserstein Distance (SWD) offers a scalable alternative,…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Bayesian experimental design (BED) is to answer the question that how to choose designs that maximize the information gathering. For implicit models, where the likelihood is intractable but sampling is possible, conventional BED methods…
The presence of uncertainty in material properties and geometry of a structure is ubiquitous. The design of robust engineering structures, therefore, needs to incorporate uncertainty in the optimization process. Stochastic gradient descent…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide a formalism to quantify and calibrate uncertainty in deep learning. Current inference approaches for BNNs often resort to few-sample estimation for scalability, which can harm predictive performance,…
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…
We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…
Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes…
We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…
The mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is widely used in training machine learning models, in particular deep learning models. We study SGD dynamics under linear regression and two-layer linear networks, with an easy…
We focus on the problem of efficient sampling and learning of probability densities by incorporating symmetries in probabilistic models. We first introduce Equivariant Stein Variational Gradient Descent algorithm -- an equivariant sampling…