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Faced with problems of increasing complexity, recent research in Bayesian Optimisation (BO) has focused on adapting deep probabilistic models as flexible alternatives to Gaussian Processes (GPs). In a similar vein, this paper investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Alexandre Maraval , Matthieu Zimmer , Antoine Grosnit , Rasul Tutunov , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou Ammar

In high-dimensional Bayesian statistics, various methods have been developed, including prior distributions that induce parameter sparsity to handle many parameters. Yet, these approaches often overlook the rich spectral structure of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-06 Tomoya Wakayama , Masaaki Imaizumi

Uncertainty quantification is central to many applications of causal machine learning, yet principled Bayesian inference for causal effects remains challenging. Standard Bayesian approaches typically require specifying a probabilistic model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Emil Javurek , Dennis Frauen , Yuxin Wang , Stefan Feuerriegel

Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-12 Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Andrew Wood , Moshik Hershcovitch , Daniel Waddington , Sarel Cohen , Peter Chin

We study Bayesian inference in statistical linear inverse problems with Gaussian noise and priors in Hilbert space. We focus our interest on the posterior contraction rate in the small noise limit. Existing results suffer from a certain…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-09-24 Sergios Agapiou , Peter Mathé

Deep learning is increasingly moving towards a transfer learning paradigm whereby large foundation models are fine-tuned on downstream tasks, starting from an initialization learned on the source task. But an initialization contains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Micah Goldblum , Hossein Souri , Sanyam Kapoor , Chen Zhu , Yann LeCun , Andrew Gordon Wilson

We advocate for a new statistical principle that combines the most desirable aspects of both parameter inference and density estimation. This leads us to the predictively oriented (PrO) posterior, which expresses uncertainty as a…

Symbolic regression algorithms search a space of mathematical expressions for formulas that explain given data. Transformer-based models have emerged as a promising, scalable approach shifting the expensive combinatorial search to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Henrik Voigt , Paul Kahlmeyer , Kai Lawonn , Michael Habeck , Joachim Giesen

Priors in Bayesian analyses often encode informative domain knowledge that can be useful in making the inference process more efficient. Occasionally, however, priors may be unrepresentative of the parameter values for a given dataset,…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-05 Xi Chen , Farhan Feroz , Michael Hobson

We study in-context learning problems where a Transformer is pretrained on tasks drawn from a mixture distribution $\pi=\sum_{\alpha\in\mathcal{A}} \lambda_{\alpha} \pi_{\alpha}$, called the pretraining prior, in which each mixture…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Tianyi Ma , Tengyao Wang , Richard J. Samworth

Amortized Bayesian inference trains neural networks to solve stochastic inference problems using model simulations, thereby making it possible to rapidly perform Bayesian inference for any newly observed data. However, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Manuel Gloeckler , Michael Deistler , Christian Weilbach , Frank Wood , Jakob H. Macke

A novel block prior is proposed for adaptive Bayesian estimation. The prior does not depend on the smoothness of the function or the sample size. It puts sufficient prior mass near the true signal and automatically concentrates on its…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-01-22 Chao Gao , Harrison H. Zhou

We propose a Bayesian approach using improper priors for hierarchical linear mixed models with flexible random effects and residual error distributions. The error distribution is modelled using scale mixtures of normals, which can capture…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-06 F. J. Rubio , M. F. J. Steel

Pretraining produces a learned parameter vector that is typically treated as a starting point for further iterative adaptation. In this work, we instead view the outcome of pretraining as a distribution over parameter vectors, whose support…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yulu Gan , Phillip Isola

This paper presents a study of the large-sample behavior of the posterior distribution of a structural parameter which is partially identified by moment inequalities. The posterior density is derived based on the limited information…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-01-13 Yuan Liao , Wenxin Jiang

This paper studies the influence of perturbations of conjugate priors in Bayesian inference. A perturbed prior is defined inside a larger family, local mixture models, and the effect on posterior inference is studied. The perturbation, in…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-01 Vahed Maroufy , Paul Marriott

Objective Bayesian inference procedures are derived for the parameters of the multivariate random effects model generalized to elliptically contoured distributions. The posterior for the overall mean vector and the between-study covariance…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-07 Olha Bodnar , Taras Bodnar

For ill-posed inverse problems, a regularised solution can be interpreted as a mode of the posterior distribution in a Bayesian framework. This framework enriches the set the solutions, as other posterior estimates can be used as a solution…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-04-22 Natalia Bochkina

Adding domain knowledge to a learning system is known to improve results. In multi-parameter Bayesian frameworks, such knowledge is incorporated as a prior. On the other hand, various model parameters can have different learning rates in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Sareh Nabi , Houssam Nassif , Joseph Hong , Hamed Mamani , Guido Imbens