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Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. It has been empirically observed that MFVI optimizers often suffer from mode collapse.…

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…

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…

Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…

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…

As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…

The Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) method is one of the most computationally efficient techniques for Bayesian inference. However, its use has been restricted to models with conjugate priors or those that require analytical…

Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model…

Mean-field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is an approximate Bayesian posterior inference technique that is increasingly popular due to its fast runtimes on large-scale datasets. However, even when MFVB provides accurate posterior means for…

Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…

Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…

Variational regression methods are an increasingly popular tool for their efficient estimation of complex. Given the mixed model representation of penalized effects, additive regression models with smoothed effects and scalar-on-function…

In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…

Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…

Mean field variational inference (VI) is the problem of finding the closest product (factorized) measure, in the sense of relative entropy, to a given high-dimensional probability measure $\rho$. The well known Coordinate Ascent Variational…

Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is its (sometimes severe) underestimates of the…

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

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…

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…