Related papers: Revisiting Unbiased Implicit Variational Inference

In Bayesian analysis, the posterior follows from the data and a choice of a prior and a likelihood. One hopes that the posterior is robust to reasonable variation in the choice of prior and likelihood, since this choice is made by the…

We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) offers a scalable alternative to traditional MCMC, by constructing an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-posterior with a small, uniformly-weighted subsample of the data. While efficient to…

Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…

Morgan and McIver's weakest pre-expectation framework is one of the most well-established methods for deductive verification of probabilistic programs. Roughly, the idea is to generalize binary state assertions to real-valued expectations,…

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Classifying incomplete multi-view data is inevitable since arbitrary view missing widely exists in real-world applications. Although great progress has been achieved, existing incomplete multi-view methods are still difficult to obtain a…

In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…

Statistical machine learning models should be evaluated and validated before putting to work. Conventional k-fold Monte Carlo Cross-Validation (MCCV) procedure uses a pseudo-random sequence to partition instances into k subsets, which…

In Part I (arXiv:1911.00619) of this article, we proposed an importance sampling algorithm to compute rare-event probabilities in forward uncertainty quantification problems. The algorithm, which we termed the "Bayesian Inverse Monte Carlo…

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) procedure for high-dimensional linear model inferences with heavy tail shrinkage priors, such as student-t prior. Theoretically, we establish the consistency of the proposed VB method and prove that…

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…

Maximizing the log-likelihood is a crucial aspect of learning latent variable models, and variational inference (VI) stands as the commonly adopted method. However, VI can encounter challenges in achieving a high log-likelihood when dealing…

We introduce a novel semi-supervised version of the least squares classifier. This implicitly constrained least squares (ICLS) classifier minimizes the squared loss on the labeled data among the set of parameters implied by all possible…

We propose stepwise variational inference (VI) with vine copulas: a universal VI procedure that combines vine copulas with a novel stepwise estimation procedure of the variational parameters. Vine copulas consist of a nested sequence of…

Robustness to outliers is a central issue in real-world machine learning applications. While replacing a model to a heavy-tailed one (e.g., from Gaussian to Student-t) is a standard approach for robustification, it can only be applied to…

How can we know whether new mechanistic interpretability methods achieve real improvements? In pursuit of lasting evaluation standards, we propose MIB, a Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark, with two tracks spanning four tasks and five…

The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In…