Related papers: Importance Weighted Variational Inference without …
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…
Inference for models with recursively defined likelihoods is computationally demanding, limiting scalability to large datasets. We propose a stabilised weighted subsampling methodology for accelerated inference based on an unbiased…
Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (VBMC) is a recently introduced framework that uses Gaussian process surrogates to perform approximate Bayesian inference in models with black-box, non-cheap likelihoods. In this work, we extend VBMC to deal…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
Modern variational inference (VI) uses stochastic gradients to avoid intractable expectations, enabling large-scale probabilistic inference in complex models. VI posits a family of approximating distributions q and then finds the member of…
Importance sampling has become an indispensable strategy to speed up optimization algorithms for large-scale applications. Improved adaptive variants - using importance values defined by the complete gradient information which changes…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been…
This work introduces meta estimators that combine multiple multifidelity techniques based on control variates, importance sampling, and information reuse to yield a quasi-multiplicative amount of variance reduction. The proposed meta…
Several algorithms involving the Variational R\'enyi (VR) bound have been proposed to minimize an alpha-divergence between a target posterior distribution and a variational distribution. Despite promising empirical results, those algorithms…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…
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…
We present a new Unbiased Minimal Variance (UMV) estimator for the purpose of reconstructing the large--scale structure of the universe from noisy, sparse and incomplete data. Similar to the Wiener Filter (WF), the UMV estimator is derived…
Control variates are variance reduction tools for Monte Carlo estimators. They can provide significant variance reduction, but usually require a large number of samples, which can be prohibitive when sampling or evaluating the integrand is…
We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…
A simple and stable method for computing accurate expectation values of observable with Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) or Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) algorithms is presented. The basic idea consists in replacing the usual ``bare'' estimator…
Estimating the gradients for binary variables is a task that arises frequently in various domains, such as training discrete latent variable models. What has been commonly used is a REINFORCE based Monte Carlo estimation method that uses…
We propose a new framework of variance-reduced Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) methods for sampling from an $L$-smooth and $m$-strongly log-concave distribution, based on a unified formulation of biased and unbiased variance reduction…
It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…