Related papers: Globally Convergent Variational Inference
Given an intractable target density $p$, variational inference (VI) attempts to find the best approximation $q$ from a tractable family $Q$. This is typically done by minimizing the exclusive Kullback-Leibler divergence, $\text{KL}(q||p)$.…
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…
Neural operators are aiming at approximating operators mapping between Banach spaces of functions, achieving much success in the field of scientific computing. Compared to certain deep learning-based solvers, such as Physics-Informed Neural…
Diffusion alignment adapts pretrained diffusion models to sample from reward-tilted distributions along the denoising trajectory. This process naturally admits a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) interpretation, where the denoising model acts as…
We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…
One of the challenges in training generative models such as the variational auto encoder (VAE) is avoiding posterior collapse. When the generator has too much capacity, it is prone to ignoring latent code. This problem is exacerbated when…
While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…
In Simulation-based Inference, the goal is to solve the inverse problem when the likelihood is only known implicitly. Neural Posterior Estimation commonly fits a normalized density estimator as a surrogate model for the posterior. This…
Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…
We present a latent variable model for classification that provides a novel probabilistic interpretation of neural network softmax classifiers. We derive a variational objective to train the model, analogous to the evidence lower bound…
Gaussian process training decomposes into inference of the (approximate) posterior and learning of the hyperparameters. For non-Gaussian (non-conjugate) likelihoods, two common choices for approximate inference are Expectation Propagation…
We introduce Variational Joint Embedding (VJE), a reconstruction-free latent-variable framework for non-contrastive self-supervised learning in representation space. VJE maximizes a symmetric conditional evidence lower bound (ELBO) on…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…
Modern variational inference (VI) uses stochastic gradients to avoid intractable expectations, enabling large-scale probabilistic inference in complex models. VI posits a family of approximating distributions q and then finds the member of…
This research considers a scalable inference for spatial data modeled through Gaussian intrinsic conditional autoregressive (ICAR) structures. The classical estimation method, restricted maximum likelihood (REML), requires repeated…
We propose a scalable inference algorithm for Bayes posteriors defined on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Given a likelihood function and a Gaussian random element representing the prior, the corresponding Bayes posterior measure…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…
We introduce a variational reasoning framework for language models that treats thinking traces as latent variables and optimizes them through variational inference. Starting from the evidence lower bound (ELBO), we extend it to a…