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Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li , Christopher De Sa , Sam Devlin , Cheng Zhang

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Felix Leibfried

Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

We present a novel approach for training deep neural networks in a Bayesian way. Classical, i.e. non-Bayesian, deep learning has two major drawbacks both originating from the fact that network parameters are considered to be deterministic.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-11 Konstantin Posch , Jan Steinbrener , Jürgen Pilz

Despite their theoretical appealingness, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are left behind in real-world adoption, mainly due to persistent concerns on their scalability, accessibility, and reliability. In this work, we develop the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhijie Deng , Jun Zhu

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

In variational inference (VI), an approximation of the posterior distribution is selected from a family of distributions through numerical optimization. With the most common variational objective function, known as the evidence lower bound…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier

Modern neural networks tend to be overconfident on unseen, noisy or incorrectly labelled data and do not produce meaningful uncertainty measures. Bayesian deep learning aims to address this shortcoming with variational approximations (such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-28 Nick Pawlowski , Andrew Brock , Matthew C. H. Lee , Martin Rajchl , Ben Glocker

Approximate inference in Bayesian deep networks exhibits a dilemma of how to yield high fidelity posterior approximations while maintaining computational efficiency and scalability. We tackle this challenge by introducing a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Son Nguyen , Duong Nguyen , Khai Nguyen , Khoat Than , Hung Bui , Nhat Ho

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) have been proposed to address the problem of model uncertainty in training and inference. By introducing weights associated with conditioned probability distributions, BNNs are capable of resolving the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-06 Ruizhe Cai , Ao Ren , Ning Liu , Caiwen Ding , Luhao Wang , Xuehai Qian , Massoud Pedram , Yanzhi Wang

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) promise improved generalization under covariate shift by providing principled probabilistic representations of epistemic uncertainty. However, weight-based BNNs often struggle with high computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-13 Trung Trinh , Markus Heinonen , Luigi Acerbi , Samuel Kaski

In this work, we focus on variational Bayesian inference on the sparse Deep Neural Network (DNN) modeled under a class of spike-and-slab priors. Given a pre-specified sparse DNN structure, the corresponding variational posterior contraction…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-04 Jincheng Bai , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Rui Shu , Hung H. Bui , Jay Whang , Stefano Ermon

We propose denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI), a black-box variational inference algorithm for latent variable models which relies on diffusion models as flexible approximate posteriors. Specifically, our method introduces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Wasu Top Piriyakulkij , Yingheng Wang , Volodymyr Kuleshov

We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

The learning and evaluation of energy-based latent variable models (EBLVMs) without any structural assumptions are highly challenging, because the true posteriors and the partition functions in such models are generally intractable. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Fan Bao , Kun Xu , Chongxuan Li , Lanqing Hong , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang

How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-13 Diederik P Kingma , Max Welling

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai