Related papers: Variational inference via radial transport

Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) are hierarchical generalizations of Gaussian Processes that combine well calibrated uncertainty estimates with the high flexibility of multilayer models. One of the biggest challenges with these models is that…

This paper considers variational inequalities (VI) defined by the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of uncertain functions and provides three stochastic approximation schemes to solve them. All methods use an empirical estimate of the CVaR…

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a very successful generative model whose key element is the so called amortized inference network, which can perform test time inference using a single feed forward pass. Unfortunately, this comes at the…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…

Standard sparse pseudo-input approximations to the Gaussian process (GP) cannot handle complex functions well. Sparse spectrum alternatives attempt to answer this but are known to over-fit. We suggest the use of variational inference for…

Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…

Wasserstein \textbf{D}istributionally \textbf{R}obust \textbf{O}ptimization (DRO) is concerned with finding decisions that perform well on data that are drawn from the worst-case probability distribution within a Wasserstein ball centered…

Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…

We revisit the replica method for analyzing inference and learning in parametric models, considering situations where the data-generating distribution is unknown or analytically intractable. Instead of assuming idealized distributions to…

We consider the problem of learning a Gaussian variational approximation to the posterior distribution for a high-dimensional parameter, where we impose sparsity in the precision matrix to reflect appropriate conditional independence…

Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…

Over-parameterized models, such as DeepNets and ConvNets, form a class of models that are routinely adopted in a wide variety of applications, and for which Bayesian inference is desirable but extremely challenging. Variational inference…

To quantify the dependence between two random vectors of possibly different dimensions, we propose to rely on the properties of the 2-Wasserstein distance. We first propose two coefficients that are based on the Wasserstein distance between…

We introduce $\textit{Stein transport}$, a novel methodology for Bayesian inference designed to efficiently push an ensemble of particles along a predefined curve of tempered probability distributions. The driving vector field is chosen…

Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…

Regression analysis for responses taking values in general metric spaces has received increasing attention, particularly for settings with Euclidean predictors $X \in \mathbb{R}^p$ and non-Euclidean responses $Y$ in metric spaces. While…

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,…

A reward-guided, gradient-free ParVI method, \textit{R-ParVI}, is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant). R-ParVI formulates the sampling problem as particle flow driven by rewards: particles are drawn from…

Wasserstein barycenter, built on the theory of optimal transport, provides a powerful framework to aggregate probability distributions, and it has increasingly attracted great attention within the machine learning community. However, it…

Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…