Related papers: Semi-Implicit Variational Inference via Kernelized…

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

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…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence…

Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…

We study the kernel instrumental variable (KIV) algorithm, a kernel-based two-stage least-squares method for nonparametric instrumental variable regression. We provide a convergence analysis covering both identified and non-identified…

Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Instrumental variable (IV) regression is a strategy for learning causal relationships in observational data. If measurements of input X and output Y are confounded, the causal relationship can nonetheless be identified if an instrumental…

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) offers a principled and flexible framework for conducting Bayesian inference in any situation where forward simulations are feasible. However, validating the accuracy and reliability of the inferred…

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

The recent boom in the literature on entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) approaches reveals that Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization brings advantages to RL algorithms by canceling out errors under mild assumptions. However,…

We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…

We propose an algorithm to estimate the path-gradient of both the reverse and forward Kullback-Leibler divergence for an arbitrary manifestly invertible normalizing flow. The resulting path-gradient estimators are straightforward to…

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and…

Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be…

We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…

In this work, we propose a new particle-based variational inference (ParVI) method for accelerating the Energetic Variational Inference with Implicit scheme (EVI-Im) introduced in Ref. \cite{wang2021particle}. Inspired by energy…

Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…

We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…