Related papers: Revisiting Unbiased Implicit Variational Inference
This work presents mixed variational flows (MixFlows), a new variational family that consists of a mixture of repeated applications of a map to an initial reference distribution. First, we provide efficient algorithms for i.i.d. sampling,…
We develop an optimization algorithm suitable for Bayesian learning in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates within a general black-box framework for efficient training with limited model-specific derivations. It…
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…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…
Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is an approach to statistical inference where simulations from an assumed model are used to construct estimators and confidence sets. SBI is often used when the likelihood is intractable and to construct…
We propose a new approach to train a variational information bottleneck (VIB) that improves its robustness to adversarial perturbations. Unlike the traditional methods where the hard labels are usually used for the classification task, we…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…
Informed Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed as scalable solutions to Bayesian posterior computation on high-dimensional discrete state spaces, but theoretical results about their convergence behavior in general…
In various industrial contexts, estimating the distribution of unobserved random vectors Xi from some noisy indirect observations H(Xi) + Ui is required. If the relation between Xi and the quantity H(Xi), measured with the error Ui, is…
We study inference in stochastic block models (SBMs) through the lens of optimal transport (OT). We first establish that maximum likelihood variational inference (MLVI) can be interpreted as a semi-relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein (srGW)…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides a feasible method for inferring Hidden Markov models, however, it is often computationally prohibitive, especially constrained by the curse of dimensionality, as the Monte Carlo sampler traverses…
The variational framework for learning inducing variables (Titsias, 2009a) has had a large impact on the Gaussian process literature. The framework may be interpreted as minimizing a rigorously defined Kullback-Leibler divergence between…
We describe a limitation in the expressiveness of the predictive uncertainty estimate given by mean-field variational inference (MFVI), a popular approximate inference method for Bayesian neural networks. In particular, MFVI fails to give…
We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…
Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) is implemented when algorithms are trained on both labeled and unlabeled data. This is a very common application of ML as it is unrealistic to obtain a fully labeled dataset. Researchers have tackled three…
Inference for models with recursively defined likelihoods is computationally demanding, limiting scalability to large datasets. We propose a stabilised weighted subsampling methodology for accelerated inference based on an unbiased…
Bayesian inference of Gibbs random fields (GRFs) is often referred to as a doubly intractable problem, since the likelihood function is intractable. The exploration of the posterior distribution of such models is typically carried out with…
Deep learning methods for communications over unknown nonlinear channels have attracted considerable interest recently. In this paper, we consider semi-supervised learning methods, which are based on variational inference, for decoding…
Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…