Related papers: EigenVI: score-based variational inference with or…

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 prove that, given a mean-field location-scale variational family, black-box variational inference (BBVI) with the reparametrization gradient converges at a rate that is nearly independent of explicit dimension dependence. Specifically,…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) greatly enriches the expressiveness of variational families by considering implicit variational distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. However, due to the intractable densities of…

Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…

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…

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…

Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…

Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

We study the variational inference problem of minimizing a regularized R\'enyi divergence over an exponential family. We propose to solve this problem with a Bregman proximal gradient algorithm. We propose a sampling-based algorithm to…

Continuous latent time series models are prevalent in Bayesian modeling; examples include the Kalman filter, dynamic collaborative filtering, or dynamic topic models. These models often benefit from structured, non mean field variational…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…

Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…

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…

We prove that black-box variational inference (BBVI) with control variates, particularly the sticking-the-landing (STL) estimator, converges at a geometric (traditionally called "linear") rate under perfect variational family specification.…

Stein variational inference (SVI) is a sample-based approximate Bayesian inference technique that generates a sample set by jointly optimizing the samples' locations to minimize an information-theoretic measure of discrepancy with the…

Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…

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…

We formalize an equivalence between two popular methods for Bayesian inference: Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and black-box variational inference (BBVI). In particular, we show that BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when the…

Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…