Related papers: Variational Inference for Latent Variable Models i…
We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models,…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…
We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
Stochastic Natural Gradient Variational Inference (NGVI) is a widely used method for approximating posterior distribution in probabilistic models. Despite its empirical success and foundational role in variational inference, its theoretical…
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a…
Automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI) offers fast and easy-to-use posterior approximation in multiple modern probabilistic programming languages. However, its stochastic optimizer lacks clear convergence criteria and…
A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs) using the latent variable representation on Polson & Scott (2012) is presented. This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated with…
How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…
Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…
The stochastic variational inference (SVI) paradigm, which combines variational inference, natural gradients, and stochastic updates, was recently proposed for large-scale data analysis in conjugate Bayesian models and demonstrated to be…
Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…
Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…
The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…
Variational inference (VI) is a central tool in modern machine learning, used to approximate an intractable target density by optimising over a tractable family of distributions. As the variational family cannot typically represent the…
Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…
Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…
Modern methods for Bayesian regression beyond the Gaussian response setting are often computationally impractical or inaccurate in high dimensions. In fact, as discussed in recent literature, bypassing such a trade-off is still an open…