Related papers: Variational and Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian I…

Bayesian inversions followed by estimations of rare event probabilities are often needed to analyse groundwater hazards. Instead of focusing on the posterior distribution of model parameters, the main interest lies then in the distribution…

Through the Bayesian lens of data assimilation, uncertainty on model parameters is traditionally quantified through the posterior covariance matrix. However, in modern settings involving high-dimensional and computationally expensive…

To obtain high-resolution images of subsurface structures from seismic data, seismic imaging techniques such as Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) serve as crucial tools. However, FWI involves solving a nonlinear and often non-unique inverse…

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…

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the…

Posterior distributions arising in ill-posed Bayesian inverse problems are often both analytically intractable and highly sensitive to parameters of the chosen prior family. We aim to understand the sensitivity of intractable posterior…

Bayesian inference has become an important tool to solve inverse problems and to quantify uncertainties in their solutions. Variational inference is a method that provides probabilistic, Bayesian solutions efficiently by using optimization.…

In this paper, we study porous media flows in heterogeneous stochastic media. We propose an efficient forward simulation technique that is tailored for variational Bayesian inversion. As a starting point, the proposed forward simulation…

Reservoir models are numerical representations of the subsurface petrophysical properties such as porosity, volume of minerals and fluid saturations. These are often derived from elastic models inferred from seismic inversion in a two-step…

Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based particle method for sampling from a target distribution, e.g., in generative modeling and Bayesian inference. SVGD does not require estimating the gradient of the log-density,…

A new variational inference method, SPH-ParVI, based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant) or sampling using gradients. SPH-ParVI simulates the flow of a fluid…

This paper introduces two variational inference approaches for infinite-dimensional inverse problems, developed through gradient descent with a constant learning rate. The proposed methods enable efficient approximate sampling from the…

This paper is concerned with the approximation of probability distributions known up to normalization constants, with a focus on Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in scientific computing. In this context, key challenges…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic particle inference algorithm that provides an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. However, SVGD has been found to suffer from variance underestimation when the…

We develop a variational Bayesian (VB) approach for estimating large-scale dynamic network models in the network autoregression framework. The VB approach allows for the automatic identification of the dynamic structure of such a model and…

Gaussian and discrete non-Gaussian spatial datasets are common across fields like public health, ecology, geosciences, and social sciences. Bayesian spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) are a flexible class of models for…

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…

We provide convergence guarantees in Wasserstein distance for a variety of variance-reduction methods: SAGA Langevin diffusion, SVRG Langevin diffusion and control-variate underdamped Langevin diffusion. We analyze these methods under a…