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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,742 papers · 148 categories

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106213319425 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for Hierarchical Variational Inference

Variational inference improves hierarchical imitation learning of control programs.

problem Learning structured control policies from demonstrations.
method Variational inference for discovering hierarchical structure in observation-action traces.
result Variational inference leads to more efficient and generalized control policies.

Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior distribution. In turn, the expressivity of the variational family is largely limited by …

2019-05-08abs ↗pdf ↗

Semi-Implicit Variational Inference (SIVI) is improved with SIVI-SM using score matching.

problem Intractable densities in variational distributions hinder SIVI training.
method SIVI-SM uses score matching to handle intractable densities in a minimax formulation.
result SIVI-SM outperforms ELBO-based SIVI methods in Bayesian inference tasks.

The paper introduces structured variational families to improve scalability in black-box variational inference.

problem Scalability issues in black-box variational inference, especially for large datasets and hierarchical models.
method Developed structured variational families that achieve better iteration complexity of O(N) compared to full-rank families.
result Structured variational families can achieve better scaling with respect to dataset size N, improving iteration complexity from O(N^2) to O(N).

CATVI improves variational inference for Bayesian nonparametric models by reducing divergence and improving prediction accuracy.

problem Limitations of current variational inference methods in characterizing latent correlations and inferring true posterior dimensions.
method CATVI integrates conditional and adaptive truncation into variational inference, maximizing nonparametric evidence lower bound and using Monte Carlo integration.
result CATVI outperforms traditional methods in Bayesian nonparametric topic models, reducing perplexity and improving topic-word clustering.

Kernel semi-implicit variational inference improves variational inference without additional optimization.

problem Intractability of hierarchical semi-implicit distributions in variational inference.
method Kernel semi-implicit variational inference (KSIVI) using kernel methods to eliminate lower-level optimization.
result KSIVI reduces variational inference to kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) optimization, improving expressiveness and tractability.

We introduce a variational approach to learning and inference of temporally hierarchical structure and representation for sequential data. We propose the Variational Temporal Abstraction (VTA), a hierarchical recurrent state space model that can infer the latent temporal structure and thus perform the stochastic state …

2019-10-02abs ↗pdf ↗

VFG model embeds flow-based models with hierarchical structures using variational inference.

problem Flow-based models struggle with high-dimensional latent spaces and lack of tractable inference for graphical structures.
method Integrates flow-based functions through variational inference with aggregation nodes for hierarchical information integration.
result VFG models achieve improved ELBO and likelihood values on multiple datasets.

Tree-based variational inference improves PLN model for hierarchical count data.

problem Limited applicability of PLN model in ecosystems due to lack of hierarchical tree structures.
method Introduced PLN-Tree model integrating structured variational inference techniques.
result Enhanced generative improvements and practical interpretability in microbiome modeling.

Implicit probabilistic models are a flexible class of models defined by a simulation process for data. They form the basis for theories which encompass our understanding of the physical world. Despite this fundamental nature, the use of implicit models remains limited due to challenges in specifying complex latent stru…

2017-02-28abs ↗pdf ↗

Paper introduces variational inference for Bayesian inverse problems with gamma hyperpriors.

problem Bayesian inverse problems with sparse solutions.
method Variational iterative alternating scheme for hierarchical models with gamma hyperpriors.
result Accurate reconstruction and meaningful uncertainty quantification.

PVI seeks a posterior that makes predictions closer to true data, not approximating the Bayesian posterior.

problem Finding meaningful posterior distributions under model misspecification.
method Predictive variational inference (PVI) seeks an optimal posterior density for close predictive matching to true data.
result PVI learns a posterior that is not the same as the Bayesian posterior, but is closer to the true data generating process.

Variational dropout (VD) is a generalization of Gaussian dropout, which aims at inferring the posterior of network weights based on a log-uniform prior on them to learn these weights as well as dropout rate simultaneously. The log-uniform prior not only interprets the regularization capacity of Gaussian dropout in netw…

2018-11-19abs ↗pdf ↗

ADAVI tackles variational inference for large HBM models in neuroimaging.

problem Large, pyramidally-organized HBM models in neuroimaging studies.
method Automatic dual amortized variational inference using neural networks and attention-based hierarchical encoding.
result Significantly reduced parameterization of the variational family, maintaining expressivity.

Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm in the sequential data setting. Our algorithm is applicable to both finite hidden Markov models and hierarchical D…

2015-12-05abs ↗pdf ↗

Semi-implicit graph variational auto-encoder (SIG-VAE) is proposed to expand the flexibility of variational graph auto-encoders (VGAE) to model graph data. SIG-VAE employs a hierarchical variational framework to enable neighboring node sharing for better generative modeling of graph dependency structure, together with …

2019-08-19abs ↗pdf ↗

Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic variational inference algorithm, automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI). …

2015-06-10abs ↗pdf ↗

Enhances graph modeling with hyperbolic geometry and variational inference.

problem Challenges in modeling relational data with complex dependencies.
method Semi-implicit hierarchical variational Bayes with Poincaré embedding and mutual information regularization.
result Improves graph representation quality and flexibility in edge prediction and node classification.

We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a hierarchical manner using a simple reparameterizable distribution whose variational …

2018-08-06abs ↗pdf ↗

MHVAE learns cross-modality inference inspired by human cognition.

problem Cross-modality inference in multimodal data.
method Hierarchical multimodal generative model with modality-specific and joint-modality distributions.
result MHVAE performs on par with state-of-the-art models on multimodal datasets.

We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Usin…

2012-06-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Enhances autoencoders to represent transformations explicitly.

problem Lack of explicit representation of transformations in autoencoders.
method Extended variational autoencoders to include latent transformations, using hierarchical graphical models.
result Inferred latent transformations reflect interpretable properties in the observation space.

Improved Kalman filtering with hierarchical variational approach.

problem Inconsistent process covariance estimation and slow convergence speed in traditional variational Kalman filtering.
method Introducing a surrogate variable for process-noise-free state, reformulating CAVI, and sliding-window hyperparameter estimation.
result Enhanced convergence speed and superior estimation accuracy compared to existing methods.

Bayesian predictive inference analyzes a dataset to make predictions about new observations. When a model does not match the data, predictive accuracy suffers. We develop population empirical Bayes (POP-EB), a hierarchical framework that explicitly models the empirical population distribution as part of Bayesian analys…

2014-11-02abs ↗pdf ↗

Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We believe a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce a hierarchical structure to induce correlation. The hope is that the proposals w…

2019-05-13abs ↗pdf ↗

Kernel SIVI improves variational inference by avoiding lower-level optimization.

problem Intractable densities in semi-implicit variational distributions.
method Kernel SIVI-SM uses a minimax formulation and kernel tricks to avoid lower-level optimization.
result Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) objective is computable and leads to convergence guarantees.

Proposes GPHMEs using Gaussian processes for hierarchical expert models.

problem Hierarchical mixtures of experts with complex gating functions.
method Gaussian process-gated hierarchical mixtures of experts (GPHMEs) with non-linear gating and expert functions.
result Outperforms tree-based HMEs and achieves good performance with reduced complexity.

Black box variational inference allows researchers to easily prototype and evaluate an array of models. Recent advances allow such algorithms to scale to high dimensions. However, a central question remains: How to specify an expressive variational distribution that maintains efficient computation? To address this, we …

2015-11-07abs ↗pdf ↗

Hierarchical IBP model for Bayesian neural networks in continual learning.

problem Resource allocation in continual learning with dynamic network complexity.
method Indian Buffet process (IBP) and Hierarchical-IBP (H-IBP) priors for structure learning, online variational inference with reparameterization.
result Our model effectively learns the number of weights in each layer, overcoming overfitting and underfitting.

New method recovers relative rates in spatial compositional data from IMS.

problem Challenges in analyzing spatial data from IMS due to competitive sampling.
method Hierarchical Variational Graph Fused Lasso using heavy-tailed graphical lasso prior and automatic differentiation variational inference.
result Our method outperforms state-of-the-practice point estimate methodologies in IMS and has superior posterior coverage.

Making inferences from data streams is a pervasive problem in many modern data analysis applications. But it requires to address the problem of continuous model updating and adapt to changes or drifts in the underlying data generating distribution. In this paper, we approach these problems from a Bayesian perspective c…

2017-07-07abs ↗pdf ↗

Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of post-hoc accuracy measures that are both theoretically justified and computationally …

2019-10-09abs ↗pdf ↗

Develops methods for structured variational inference with star-structured models.

problem Inference in models with interdependent variables.
method Star-structured variational inference, existence, uniqueness, self-consistency proofs, approximation error bounds, gradient-based algorithm.
result First results for existence, uniqueness, and self-consistency of variational approximations in star-structured models.

The paper develops a decision support system for hierarchical text classification of conference proceedings.

problem Classifying documents with a fixed hierarchical structure of topics.
method Developed a weighted hierarchical similarity function to calculate topic relevance, using entropy of words to estimate weights.
result The weighted hierarchical similarity function improves ranking accuracy compared to other methods.

We utilize copulas to constitute a unified framework for constructing and optimizing variational proposals in hierarchical Bayesian models. For models with continuous and non-Gaussian hidden variables, we propose a semiparametric and automated variational Gaussian copula approach, in which the parametric Gaussian copul…

2015-06-19abs ↗pdf ↗

We develop a nested hierarchical Dirichlet process (nHDP) for hierarchical topic modeling. The nHDP is a generalization of the nested Chinese restaurant process (nCRP) that allows each word to follow its own path to a topic node according to a document-specific distribution on a shared tree. This alleviates the rigid, …

2012-10-25abs ↗pdf ↗