English
Related papers

Related papers: Conditional neural control variates for variance r…

200 papers

In this work we explore a straightforward variational Bayes scheme for Recurrent Neural Networks. Firstly, we show that a simple adaptation of truncated backpropagation through time can yield good quality uncertainty estimates and superior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Meire Fortunato , Charles Blundell , Oriol Vinyals

Since the turn of the century, approximate Bayesian inference has steadily evolved as new computational techniques have been incorporated to handle increasingly complex and large-scale predictive problems. The recent success of deep neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-14 Roy Shivam Ram Shreshtth , Arnab Hazra , Gourab Mukherjee

In many inverse problems, model parameters cannot be precisely determined from observational data. Bayesian inference provides a mechanism for capturing the resulting parameter uncertainty, but typically at a high computational cost. This…

Computation · Statistics 2019-03-28 Matthew Parno , Tarek Moselhy , Youssef Marzouk

In the Bayesian approach, the a priori knowledge about the input of a mathematical model is described via a probability measure. The joint distribution of the unknown input and the data is then conditioned, using Bayes' formula, giving rise…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-15 Sebastian J. Vollmer

Bayesian formulations of inverse problems are attractive for their ability to incorporate prior knowledge and update probabilistic models as new data become available. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample posterior probability…

Geophysics · Physics 2025-05-07 Giovanni Angelo Meles , Stefano Marelli , Niklas Linde

This paper presents an improved implicit sampling method for hierarchical Bayesian inverse problems. A widely used approach for sampling posterior distribution is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, the samples generated by…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-11-27 Xiaoyan Song , Lijian Jiang , Guanghui Zheng

Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke

The control variates (CV) method is widely used in policy gradient estimation to reduce the variance of the gradient estimators in practice. A control variate is applied by subtracting a baseline function from the state-action value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Yuanyi Zhong , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Among other uses, neural networks are a powerful tool for solving deterministic and Bayesian inverse problems in real-time, where variational autoencoders, a specialized type of neural network, enable the Bayesian estimation of model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Andrea Tonini , Luca Dede'

This work aims efficiently estimating the posterior distribution of kinetic parameters for dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) imaging given a measurement of time of activity curve. Considering the inherent information loss from…

Medical Physics · Physics 2023-10-25 Xiaofeng Liu , Thibault Marin , Tiss Amal , Jonghye Woo , Georges El Fakhri , Jinsong Ouyang

This paper is concerned with Bayesian inferential methods for data from controlled branching processes that account for model robustness through the use of disparities. Under regularity conditions, we establish that estimators built on…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-19 M. González , C. Minuesa , I. del Puerto , A. N. Vidyashankar

We introduce priors and algorithms to perform Bayesian inference in Gaussian models defined by acyclic directed mixed graphs. Such a class of graphs, composed of directed and bi-directed edges, is a representation of conditional…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-07-02 Ricardo Silva , Zoubin Ghahramani

Parameter inference is a fundamental problem in data-driven modeling. Given observed data that is believed to be a realization of some parameterized model, the aim is to find parameter values that are able to explain the observed data. In…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-04-20 Carlo Albert , Simone Ulzega , Ruedi Stoop

Variance reduction techniques have been shown by others in the past to be a useful tool to reduce variance in Simulation studies. However, their application and success in the past has been mainly domain specific, with relatively little…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2013-06-03 Adrian Adewunmi , Uwe Aickelin

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-19 Yuling Yao , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

An important step for any causal inference study design is understanding the distribution of the treated and control subjects in terms of measured baseline covariates. However, not all baseline variation is equally important. In the…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-07-02 Rachael C. Aikens , Michael Baiocchi

We propose the use of Bayesian networks, which provide both a mean value and an uncertainty estimate as output, to enhance the safety of learned control policies under circumstances in which a test-time input differs significantly from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Keuntaek Lee , Kamil Saigol , Evangelos A. Theodorou

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…

Solving inverse problems in cardiovascular modeling is particularly challenging due to the high computational cost of running high-fidelity simulations. In this work, we focus on Bayesian parameter estimation and explore different methods…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-22 Chloe H. Choi , Andrea Zanoni , Daniele E. Schiavazzi , Alison L. Marsden

Variational Bayes (VB) has been used to facilitate the calculation of the posterior distribution in the context of Bayesian inference of the parameters of nonlinear models from data. Previously an analytical formulation of VB has been…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-07-06 Michael A. Chappell , Martin S. Craig , Mark W. Woolrich