Related papers: Fenchel-Young Variational Learning
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Variational Bayesian neural nets combine the flexibility of deep learning with Bayesian uncertainty estimation. Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff between cheap but simple variational families (e.g.~fully factorized) or expensive and…
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized inference models designed to sample from unnormalized distributions over composable objects, with applications in generative modeling for tasks in fields such as causal discovery, NLP, and…
Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…
While deep learning has expanded the possibilities for highly expressive variational families, the practical benefits of these tools for variational inference (VI) are often limited by the minimization of the traditional Kullback-Leibler…
Recent advances in deep learning have brought to the fore models that can make multiple computational steps in the service of completing a task; these are capable of describ- ing long-term dependencies in sequential data. Novel recurrent…
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…
In the problem of online learning for changing environments, data are sequentially received one after another over time, and their distribution assumptions may vary frequently. Although existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of…
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…
Auto-encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB) is a powerful and general algorithm for fitting latent variable models (a promising direction for unsupervised learning), and is well-known for training the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). In this…
Deep energy-based models (EBMs) are very flexible in distribution parametrization but computationally challenging because of the intractable partition function. They are typically trained via maximum likelihood, using contrastive divergence…
In this paper, we consider variational autoencoders (VAE) for general state space models. We consider a backward factorization of the variational distributions to analyze the excess risk associated with VAE. Such backward factorizations…
Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) employ parameterized quantum circuits optimized using classical methods to minimize a cost function. While VQAs have found broad applications, certain challenges persist. Notably, a significant…
We reinterpreting the variational inference in a new perspective. Via this way, we can easily prove that EM algorithm, VAE, GAN, AAE, ALI(BiGAN) are all special cases of variational inference. The proof also reveals the loss of standard GAN…
As a distributed learning paradigm, Federated Learning (FL) faces the communication bottleneck issue due to many rounds of model synchronization and aggregation. Heterogeneous data further deteriorates the situation by causing slow…
Incrementally training deep neural networks to recognize new classes is a challenging problem. Most existing class-incremental learning methods store data or use generative replay, both of which have drawbacks, while 'rehearsal-free'…
Empirical divergence maximization (EDM) refers to a recently proposed strategy for estimating f-divergences and likelihood ratio functions. This paper extends the idea to empirical vector quantization where one seeks to empirically derive…
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
Federated Learning (FL) is a promising framework for performing privacy-preserving, distributed learning with a set of clients. However, the data distribution among clients often exhibits non-IID, i.e., distribution shift, which makes…
An obstacle to artificial general intelligence is set by continual learning of multiple tasks of different nature. Recently, various heuristic tricks, both from machine learning and from neuroscience angles, were proposed, but they lack a…