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Related papers: Stability of Mean-Field Variational Inference

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In this paper, we extend a recently introduced multi-fidelity control variate for the uncertainty quantification of the Boltzmann equation to the case of kinetic models arising in the study of multiagent systems. For these phenomena, where…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-02-05 Lorenzo Pareschi , Torsten Trimborn , Mattia Zanella

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-27 Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

Recent work has demonstrated that Bayesian neural networks (BNN's) trained with mean field variational inference (MFVI) can be implemented in analog hardware, promising orders of magnitude energy savings compared to the standard digital…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Ravi G. Patel , T. Patrick Xiao , Sapan Agarwal , Christopher Bennett

The recently developed Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods drive the empirical distribution of a set of \emph{fixed-weight} particles towards a given target distribution $\pi$ by iteratively updating particles' positions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Chao Zhang , Zhijian Li , Hui Qian , Xin Du

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Daniel Marks , Dario Paccagnan , Mark van der Wilk

Our work is motivated by a desire to study the theoretical underpinning for the convergence of stochastic gradient type algorithms widely used for non-convex learning tasks such as training of neural networks. The key insight, already…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-12-15 Kaitong Hu , Zhenjie Ren , David Siska , Lukasz Szpruch

Understanding the gradient variance of black-box variational inference (BBVI) is a crucial step for establishing its convergence and developing algorithmic improvements. However, existing studies have yet to show that the gradient variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Kyurae Kim , Kaiwen Wu , Jisu Oh , Jacob R. Gardner

A key challenge for modern Bayesian statistics is how to perform scalable inference of posterior distributions. To address this challenge, variational Bayes (VB) methods have emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-09 Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\target$ using the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm and provide rate of convergences for this algorithm in terms of Wasserstein distance of order $2$. Our result holds as long as the…

Computation · Statistics 2016-07-04 Thomas Bonis

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) methods due to their ability to rapidly generate samples from complex distributions. However, since the likelihood of these samples is non-trivial to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Tobias Pielok , Bernd Bischl , David Rügamer

The Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference scheme is a popular algorithm used to compute the mean-field approximation of a probability distribution of interest. We analyze its random scan version, under log-concavity assumptions on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-24 Hugo Lavenant , Giacomo Zanella

Mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional defined over the space of probability distributions. MFLD has gained attention due to its connection with noisy gradient descent for mean-field…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Atsushi Nitanda

Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-26 Oliver Dürr , Stephan Hörling , Daniel Dold , Ivonne Kovylov , Beate Sick

Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

The problem of determining a periodic Lipschitz vector field $b=(b_1, \dots, b_d)$ from an observed trajectory of the solution $(X_t: 0 \le t \le T)$ of the multi-dimensional stochastic differential equation \begin{equation*} dX_t =…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-21 Richard Nickl , Kolyan Ray

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

One of the main modeling in many data science applications is the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and Mean Field Variational Bayesian Inference (MFVBI) is classically used for approximate fast computation. In this paper, we provide a…

Differential Geometry · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Alireza Bahraini , Saeed Sadeghi

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Kaiwen Wu , Jacob R. Gardner

Under general assumptions on the target distribution $p^\star$, we establish a sharp Lipschitz regularity theory for flow-matching vector fields and diffusion-model scores, with optimal dependence on time and dimension. As applications, we…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Arthur Stéphanovitch