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Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-30 Junhao Hua , Chunguang Li

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) with Gaussian mixture families offers a flexible approach for approximating complex posterior distributions without requiring gradients of the target density. However, standard numerical optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Baojun Che , Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Xinying Mao , Weijie Wang

For complex simulation problems, inferring parameters often precludes the use of classical likelihood-based techniques due to intractable likelihoods. Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods offer a likelihood-free approach to directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Haley Rosso , Talea Mayo

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Yuda Shao , Shan Yu , Tianshu Feng

Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-15 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Reza Babanezhad , Wu Lin , Mark Schmidt , Masashi Sugiyama

Learning probability distributions on the weights of neural networks (NNs) has recently proven beneficial in many applications. Bayesian methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), offer an elegant framework to reason about…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-03 Ruiyi Zhang , Chunyuan Li , Changyou Chen , Lawrence Carin

We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-29 Guillaume Alain , Yoshua Bengio , Li Yao , Jason Yosinski , Eric Thibodeau-Laufer , Saizheng Zhang , Pascal Vincent

One of the core problems in variational inference is a choice of approximate posterior distribution. It is crucial to trade-off between efficient inference with simple families as mean-field models and accuracy of inference. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Evgenii Egorov , Kirill Neklydov , Ruslan Kostoev , Evgeny Burnaev

Bayesian posterior inference is prevalent in various machine learning problems. Variational inference provides one way to approximate the posterior distribution, however its expressive power is limited and so is the accuracy of resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Guoqing Zheng , Yiming Yang , Jaime Carbonell

Sequential Bayesian inference can be used for continual learning to prevent catastrophic forgetting of past tasks and provide an informative prior when learning new tasks. We revisit sequential Bayesian inference and test whether having…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Samuel Kessler , Adam Cobb , Tim G. J. Rudner , Stefan Zohren , Stephen J. Roberts

Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a flexible and general approach to performing Bayesian inference: In SBI, a neural network is trained on synthetic data simulated from a model and used to rapidly infer posterior distributions for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Julius Vetter , Manuel Gloeckler , Daniel Gedon , Jakob H. Macke

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) has been introduced to expand the analytical variational families by defining expressive semi-implicit distributions in a hierarchical manner. However, the single-layer architecture commonly used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Longlin Yu , Tianyu Xie , Yu Zhu , Tong Yang , Xiangyu Zhang , Cheng Zhang

Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-22 Xuezhen Li , Can M. Le

We introduce Sequential Neural Posterior Score Estimation (SNPSE), a score-based method for Bayesian inference in simulator-based models. Our method, inspired by the remarkable success of score-based methods in generative modelling,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Louis Sharrock , Jack Simons , Song Liu , Mark Beaumont

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Mingzhang Yin , Y. X. Rachel Wang , Purnamrita Sarkar

We address the problem of continual learning in multi-task Gaussian process (GP) models for handling sequential input-output observations. Our approach extends the existing prior-posterior recursion of online Bayesian inference, i.e.\ past…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-04 Pablo Moreno-Muñoz , Antonio Artés-Rodríguez , Mauricio A. Álvarez

We present a new method to approximate posterior probabilities of Bayesian Network using Deep Neural Network. Experiment results on several public Bayesian Network datasets shows that Deep Neural Network is capable of learning joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-12 Jie Jia , Honggang Zhou , Yunchun Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li , Christopher De Sa , Sam Devlin , Cheng Zhang

In the context of supervised learning of a function by a neural network, we claim and empirically verify that the neural network yields better results when the distribution of the data set focuses on regions where the function to learn is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-28 Paul Novello , Gaël Poëtte , David Lugato , Pietro Congedo

We present a generative modeling approach based on the variational inference framework for likelihood-free simulation-based inference. The method leverages latent variables within variational autoencoders to efficiently estimate complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mayank Nautiyal , Andrey Shternshis , Andreas Hellander , Prashant Singh