Related papers: Importance Weighted Variational Inference without …

The parameter derivative of the expectation value of the energy, $\partial E/\partial p$, is a key ingredient in variational quantum Monte Carlo (VMC) wave function optimization methods. In some cases, a na\"ive Monte Carlo estimate of this…

Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…

The importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE) (Burda et al., 2016) is a popular variational-inference method which achieves a tighter evidence bound (and hence a lower bias) than standard variational autoencoders by optimising a multi-sample…

Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We believe a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce…

We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…

Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide reliable…

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are popular deep latent variable models which are trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). To obtain tighter ELBO and hence better variational approximations, it has been proposed to use…

The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…

We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…

We show that the gradient estimates used in training Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) with importance-weighted variational inference are susceptible to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) issues. Specifically, we show both theoretically and via an…

We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

In Variational Inference (VI), coordinate-ascent and gradient-based approaches are two major types of algorithms for approximating difficult-to-compute probability densities. In real-world implementations of complex models, Monte Carlo…

This report explains, implements and extends the works presented in "Tighter Variational Bounds are Not Necessarily Better" (T Rainforth et al., 2018). We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that increasing the number of importance…

Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically…

Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…

In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…

Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…

Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…