Related papers: Variational inference for hierarchical models with…
We present an iterative framework to improve the amortized approximations of posterior distributions in the context of Bayesian inverse problems, which is inspired by loop-unrolled gradient descent methods and is theoretically grounded in…
The cumulative shrinkage process is an increasing shrinkage prior that can be employed within models in which additional terms are supposed to play a progressively negligible role. A natural application is to Gaussian factor models, where…
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 inference techniques based on inducing variables provide an elegant framework for scalable posterior estimation in Gaussian process (GP) models. Besides enabling scalability, one of their main advantages over sparse…
Recently, we and several other authors have written about the possibilities of using stochastic approximation techniques for fitting variational approximations to intractable Bayesian posterior distributions. Naive implementations of…
Structured variational inference constitutes a core methodology in modern statistical applications. Unlike mean-field variational inference, the approximate posterior is assumed to have interdependent structure. We consider the natural…
Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
In a general class of Bayesian nonparametric models, we prove that the posterior distribution can be asymptotically approximated by a Gaussian process. Our results apply to nonparametric exponential family that contains both Gaussian and…
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…
Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…
One of the fundamental problems in Bayesian statistics is the approximation of the posterior distribution. Gibbs sampler and coordinate ascent variational inference are renownedly utilized approximation techniques that rely on stochastic…
We consider the optimal approximate posterior over the top-layer weights in a Bayesian neural network for regression, and show that it exhibits strong dependencies on the lower-layer weights. We adapt this result to develop a correlated…
Variational Inference makes a trade-off between the capacity of the variational family and the tractability of finding an approximate posterior distribution. Instead, Boosting Variational Inference allows practitioners to obtain…
Posterior distributions arising in ill-posed Bayesian inverse problems are often both analytically intractable and highly sensitive to parameters of the chosen prior family. We aim to understand the sensitivity of intractable posterior…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
We propose an efficient way to sample from a class of structured multivariate Gaussian distributions which routinely arise as conditional posteriors of model parameters that are assigned a conditionally Gaussian prior. The proposed…
Logistic regression involving high-dimensional covariates is a practically important problem. Often the goal is variable selection, i.e., determining which few of the many covariates are associated with the binary response. Unfortunately,…
We introduce a variational Bayesian neural network where the parameters are governed via a probability distribution on random matrices. Specifically, we employ a matrix variate Gaussian \cite{gupta1999matrix} parameter posterior…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…