Related papers: Globally Convergent Variational Inference
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as an important aspect of generative models, have received a lot of research interests and reached many successful applications. However, it is always a challenge to achieve the consistency between the…
This article considers Bayesian model selection via mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Towards this goal, we study the non-asymptotic properties of MF inference under the Bayesian framework that allows latent variables and model…
In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…
Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) have been very successful as methods for forming compressed latent representations of complex, often high-dimensional, data. In this paper, we derive an alternative variational lower bound from the one…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…
The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…
Particle-based variational inference offers a flexible way of approximating complex posterior distributions with a set of particles. In this paper we introduce a new particle-based variational inference method based on the theory of…
We show that the herding procedure of Welling (2009) takes exactly the form of a standard convex optimization algorithm--namely a conditional gradient algorithm minimizing a quadratic moment discrepancy. This link enables us to invoke…
To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the…
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…
We propose a variant of consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithms, controlled-CBO, which introduces a feedback control term to improve convergence towards global minimizers of non-convex functions in multiple dimensions. The feedback…
Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…
We explore a new research direction in Bayesian variational inference with discrete latent variable priors where we exploit Kronecker matrix algebra for efficient and exact computations of the evidence lower bound (ELBO). The proposed…
We conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the mean-field variational inference for approximating posterior distributions in complex Bayesian models that may involve latent variables. We show that the mean-field approximation to the posterior…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
Approximate inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-conjugate likelihoods gets entangled with the learning of the model hyperparameters. We improve hyperparameter learning in GP models and focus on the interplay between…
We analyze the convergence of the averaged stochastic gradient descent for overparameterized two-layer neural networks for regression problems. It was recently found that a neural tangent kernel (NTK) plays an important role in showing the…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…