Related papers: Solving Empirical Bayes via Transformers

We consider the problem of empirical Bayes estimation for (multivariate) Poisson means. Existing solutions that have been shown theoretically optimal for minimizing the regret (excess risk over the Bayesian oracle that knows the prior) have…

We theoretically justify the recent empirical finding of [Teh et al., 2025] that a transformer pretrained on synthetically generated data achieves strong performance on empirical Bayes (EB) problems. We take an indirect approach to this…

Empirical Bayes methods are widely used for large-scale estimation and inference in the Poisson means problem. Existing results establish theoretical properties of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) for optimal posterior…

Empirical Bayes (EB) is a popular framework for large-scale inference that aims to find data-driven estimators to compete with the Bayesian oracle that knows the true prior. Two principled approaches to EB estimation have emerged over the…

We consider the classical problems of estimating the mean of an $n$-dimensional normally (with identity covariance matrix) or Poisson distributed vector under the squared loss. In a Bayesian setting the optimal estimator is given by the…

In this paper, we consider the problem of parametric empirical Bayes estimation of an i.i.d. prior in high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression, with random design. We obtain the asymptotic distribution of the variational Empirical Bayes…

Amortized Bayesian inference trains neural networks to solve stochastic inference problems using model simulations, thereby making it possible to rapidly perform Bayesian inference for any newly observed data. However, current…

When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…

The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…

The Robbins estimator is the most iconic and widely used procedure in the empirical Bayes literature for the Poisson model. On one hand, this method has been recently shown to be minimax optimal in terms of the regret (excess risk over the…

The Poisson compound decision problem is a long-standing problem in statistics, where empirical Bayes methodologies are commonly used to estimate Poisson's means in static or batch domains. In this paper, we study the Poisson compound…

Parameter estimation is one of the most important tasks in statistics, and is key to helping people understand the distribution behind a sample of observations. Traditionally parameter estimation is done either by closed-form solutions…

We propose an empirical Bayes estimator based on Dirichlet process mixture model for estimating the sparse normalized mean difference, which could be directly applied to the high dimensional linear classification. In theory, we build a…

Parametric empirical Bayes (EB) estimators have been widely used in variety of fields including small area estimation, disease mapping. Since EB estimator is constructed by plugging in the estimator of parameters in prior distributions, it…

Bayesian filtering approximates the true underlying behavior of a time-varying system by inverting an explicit generative model to convert noisy measurements into state estimates. This process typically requires either storage, inversion,…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) employ Bayesian inference to interpret sensory inputs, mirroring processes that occur in primate vision across both ventral (Higgins et al., 2021) and dorsal (Vafaii et al., 2023) pathways. Despite their…

Transformers have achieved significant success in various fields, notably excelling in tasks involving sequential data like natural language processing. Despite these achievements, the theoretical understanding of transformers' capabilities…

Transformer has become ubiquitous due to its dominant performance in various NLP and image processing tasks. However, it lacks understanding of how to generate mathematically grounded uncertainty estimates for transformer architectures.…

In applications of Bayesian procedures, once a class of priors has been chosen, it may be tempting to fix the prior's hyperparameters from the data, in an empirical Bayes (EB) fashion, usually by their maximum marginal likelihood estimates…

Empirical Bayes (EB) improves the accuracy of simultaneous inference "by learning from the experience of others" (Efron, 2012). Classical EB theory focuses on latent variables that are iid draws from a fitted prior (Efron, 2019). Modern…