This paper speeds up inference in large hierarchical models.
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Variational inference improves hierarchical imitation learning of control programs.
New method improves inference for hierarchical models.
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 …
New MIF architecture improves posterior approximations in Bayesian models.
Semi-Implicit Variational Inference (SIVI) is improved with SIVI-SM using score matching.
The paper introduces structured variational families to improve scalability in black-box variational inference.
CATVI improves variational inference for Bayesian nonparametric models by reducing divergence and improving prediction accuracy.
Kernel semi-implicit variational inference improves variational inference without additional optimization.
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 …
VFG model embeds flow-based models with hierarchical structures using variational inference.
Tree-based variational inference improves PLN model for hierarchical count data.
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…
Paper introduces variational inference for Bayesian inverse problems with gamma hyperpriors.
This note compares two recently published machine learning methods for constructing flexible, but tractable families of variational hidden-variable posteriors. The first method, called "hierarchical variational models" enriches the inference model with an extra variable, while the other, called "auxiliary deep generati…
PVI seeks a posterior that makes predictions closer to true data, not approximating the Bayesian posterior.
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…
ADAVI tackles variational inference for large HBM models in neuroimaging.
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…
Develops a method for learning proposals in nested importance samplers.
The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the latent variables such as standard normal distribution, thereby restricting its appli…
PAVI speeds up Bayesian inference for large datasets.
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 …
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). …
A-VI can approximate F-VI under certain conditions, improving inference in some models.
Enhances graph modeling with hyperbolic geometry and variational inference.
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 …
MHVAE learns cross-modality inference inspired by human cognition.
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…
Enhances autoencoders to represent transformations explicitly.
Improved Kalman filtering with hierarchical variational approach.
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…
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…
Kernel SIVI improves variational inference by avoiding lower-level optimization.
Proposes GPHMEs using Gaussian processes for hierarchical expert models.
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 …
Hierarchical IBP model for Bayesian neural networks in continual learning.
Despite the advances in the representational capacity of approximate distributions for variational inference, the optimization process can still limit the density that is ultimately learned. We demonstrate the drawbacks of biasing the true posterior to be unimodal, and introduce Annealed Variational Objectives (AVO) in…
New method recovers relative rates in spatial compositional data from IMS.
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…
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 …
Develops methods for structured variational inference with star-structured models.
New federated learning method for structured models.
The paper develops a decision support system for hierarchical text classification of conference proceedings.
Hierarchical Bayesian methods can unify many related tasks (e.g. k-shot classification, conditional and unconditional generation) as inference within a single generative model. However, when this generative model is expressed as a powerful neural network such as a PixelCNN, we show that existing learning techniques typ…
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…
The problem of low rank matrix completion is considered in this paper. To exploit the underlying low-rank structure of the data matrix, we propose a hierarchical Gaussian prior model, where columns of the low-rank matrix are assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and a common precision matrix, and a W…
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, …