Related papers: Variational Transdimensional Inference
Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…
Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would…
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 often struggles with the posterior geometry exhibited by complex hierarchical Bayesian models. Recent advances in flow-based variational families and Variationally Inferred Parameters (VIP) each address aspects of this…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…
Probabilistic state estimation is essential for robots navigating uncertain environments. Accurately and efficiently managing uncertainty in estimated states is key to robust robotic operation. However, nonlinearities in robotic platforms…
Seismic tomography is a methodology to image the interior of solid or fluid media, and is often used to map properties in the subsurface of the Earth. In order to better interpret the resulting images it is important to assess imaging…
Variational Bayes (VB) has been used to facilitate the calculation of the posterior distribution in the context of Bayesian inference of the parameters of nonlinear models from data. Previously an analytical formulation of VB has been…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…
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…
While Variational Inequality (VI) is a well-established mathematical framework that subsumes Nash equilibrium and saddle-point problems, less is known about its extension, Quasi-Variational Inequalities (QVI). QVI allows for cases where the…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…
We introduce stochastic normalizing flows, an extension of continuous normalizing flows for maximum likelihood estimation and variational inference (VI) using stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Using the theory of rough paths, the…
We review recently proposed Bayesian approaches for clustering high-dimensional data. After identifying the main limitations of available approaches, we introduce an alternative framework based on vertical consensus inference (VCI) to…
Over-parameterized models, such as DeepNets and ConvNets, form a class of models that are routinely adopted in a wide variety of applications, and for which Bayesian inference is desirable but extremely challenging. Variational inference…
We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…
The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…
We present FlowSN, a statistical framework using simulation-based inference (SBI) with normalising flows to account for selection effects in observational astronomy. Failure to account for selection effects can lead to biased inference on…
Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…