A new method for analyzing latent space models without reference configurations.
problem Posterior summaries of latent coordinates in Euclidean latent space models are not canonical due to likelihood invariance.
method Quotient-based posterior analysis using the centered Gram map.
result Intrinsic posterior summaries of mean structure and uncertainty can be computed directly from posterior samples.
Variational autoencoders often collapse, showing latent variables are non-identifiable.
problem Posterior collapse in variational autoencoders due to non-identifiable latent variables.
method Proves latent variable non-identifiability causes posterior collapse. Proposes latent-identifiable models using Brenier maps and input convex neural networks.
result Latent-identifiable models resolve posterior collapse and provide meaningful representations.
New method improves generative model performance by fully conditioning variational posteriors.
problem Inaccurate inference due to partial conditioning of variational posteriors in sequential LVMs.
method Introduces fully-conditioned approximate posteriors to improve generative model performance.
result Improves generative modelling and multi-step prediction performance.
PPT optimizes transformer behavior by steering its latent posterior using prior samples.
problem Eliciting desired behavior from transformers without backpropagation.
method Posterior Prefix Tuning (PPT) uses predictive Monte Carlo (PMC) samples and importance sampling to optimize the latent posterior.
result PPT optimizes transformer behavior without backpropagation, achieving high utility across different utility functions.
DDVI uses diffusion models for variational inference, improving latent variable model performance.
problem Improving variational inference in latent variable models.
method Introduces diffusion-based variational posteriors trained with a regularized ELBO.
result Outperforms alternative variational posteriors on various benchmarks and a biology task.
This work tackles posterior collapse in conditional and hierarchical VAEs.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs leads to poor latent variable representations.
method Theoretical analysis of linear conditional and hierarchical VAEs, empirical validation.
result Theoretical and empirical evidence of posterior collapse causes in conditional and hierarchical VAEs.
New critics improve VAEs by preventing latent collapse.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs where latent variables are ignored.
method Inference critics that detect and incentivize meaningful latent representations.
result Optimizing inference critics increases mutual information between latent and observations.
NE-VAE prevents posterior collapse in VAEs by embedding neighbors in latent space.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs when strong decoders are used.
method Neighbor embedding in latent space to prevent collapse.
result NE-VAE produces qualitatively different latent representations with active latent dimensions.
SPOT improves differentiable causal discovery by estimating skeleton posterior for latent confounders.
problem Scalable and accurate estimation of causal skeletons in the presence of latent confounders.
method SPOT (Skeleton Posterior-guided OpTimization) framework that estimates skeleton posterior and integrates it with differentiable causal discovery.
result SPOT enhances differentiable causal discovery by reducing the search space and improving accuracy.
Estimates the ratio of posterior distributions of latent variables.
problem Comparing posterior distributions of latent variables inferred from observations.
method Parametric model approximation and estimation using observed and prior samples.
result Consistent and asymptotically normal estimation of posterior ratio parameters.
Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully exploits GPU parallelism. However, such simple approximate posteriors are often insuf…
Variational language models seek to estimate the posterior of latent variables with an approximated variational posterior. The model often assumes the variational posterior to be factorized even when the true posterior is not. The learned variational posterior under this assumption does not capture the dependency relat…
New method controls posterior collapse in VAEs without network architecture constraints.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs reduces diversity of generated samples.
method Introduces Latent Reconstruction (LR) loss to control posterior collapse.
result Controls posterior collapse on various datasets without architectural constraints.
Levenshtein VAE prevents posterior collapse in text generation models.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs where generators ignore latent variables.
method Replaces ELBO with a Levenshtein distance-based objective to prevent collapse.
result Levenshtein VAE produces more informative latent representations.
Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling
problem Approximating posterior distributions with complex dependencies among latent variables
method Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI)
result Flexible and accurate posterior approximation with arbitrary shapes
GFlowNet-EM learns complex latent variable models with discrete structures.
problem Challenges in modeling posteriors over discrete compositional latents with expectation-maximization.
method Uses GFlowNets to learn stochastic policies for sampling from complex posterior distributions.
result GFlowNet-EM enables training expressive LVMs with discrete compositional latents.
Langevin autoencoders improve deep latent variable models with efficient posterior sampling.
problem Efficient posterior sampling in deep latent variable models using MCMC.
method Amortized Langevin dynamics (ALD) replaces datapoint-wise sampling with encoder updates.
result ALD is valid as an MCMC algorithm with the target posterior as a stationary distribution.
Method evaluates disentanglement in DLVMs, including those not aligned with latent axes.
problem Evaluate disentanglement in DLVMs, especially those not aligned with latent axes.
method Proposes a statistical method to discover generative factors of a dataset.
result Empirically demonstrates the advantage of the method on two datasets.
Deep latent variable models (LVM) such as variational auto-encoder (VAE) have recently played an important role in text generation. One key factor is the exploitation of smooth latent structures to guide the generation. However, the representation power of VAEs is limited due to two reasons: (1) the Gaussian assumption…
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular combination of deep latent variable model and accompanying variational learning technique. By using a neural inference network to approximate the model's posterior on latent variables, VAEs efficiently parameterize a lower bound on marginal data likelihood that can be opti…
A new method learns latent variable updates directly, not approximating the posterior.
problem Intractable maximum-likelihood learning for complex latent-variable models.
method Amortised learning using wake-sleep Monte-Carlo strategy.
result Demonstrated effectiveness on various complex models.
Method reformulates constrained optimization as latent space inference.
problem Optimizing black-box functions with hard constraints.
method Posterior inference in latent space using flow-based models and diffusion models.
result Method achieves superior performance across various tasks.
Bayesian deep learning faces posterior collapse due to likelihood vs. prior competition.
problem Posterior collapse in Bayesian deep learning models.
method Identified competition between likelihood and prior regularization in a linear latent variable model.
result Posterior collapse is related to neural and dimensional collapse, suggesting a broader learning issue.
Online distributional prediction with latent cluster geometry
problem Predicting the full data-generating distribution in non-stationary streams
method Representing candidate laws as latent cluster geometry and using Gibbs quasi-posterior
result Achieving sublinear cumulative Wasserstein regret under bounded support and stable latent geometry
Simulation-free VI closes the approximation gap in latent SDEs
problem Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations
method Helmholtz-SDE
result Recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior methods
SentenceMIM learns rich latent representations for variable-length language data.
problem Challenges in learning VAEs for variable-length language data, especially posterior collapse.
method Probabilistic auto-encoder trained with Mutual Information Machine (MIM) learning.
result SentenceMIM learns informative latent representations with high mutual information.
New method solves linear inverse problems using diffusion models.
problem Linear inverse problems in various domains.
method Posterior sampling with latent diffusion models.
result Provable sample recovery in linear models, outperforming previous methods.
Existing Bayesian models, especially nonparametric Bayesian methods, rely on specially conceived priors to incorporate domain knowledge for discovering improved latent representations. While priors can affect posterior distributions through Bayes' rule, imposing posterior regularization is arguably more direct and in s…
Unified sampling approach for Bayesian imaging problems.
problem Sampling from complex prior and posterior distributions in Bayesian imaging.
method Gaussian latent machine model for efficient prior and posterior sampling.
result Unified and generalized sampling algorithms for various imaging problems.
Paper presents a reparameterized DP-DLGMM for clustering.
problem Non-parametric DP priors in DLGMM are hard to couple with variational inference.
method Closed-form updates for DP-DLGMM's variational posterior.
result Model generates realistic samples and performs competitively in semi-supervised settings.
A new method for efficient inference in sequential latent-variable models.
problem Computational challenges in integrating subject-specific random effects.
method Anchored variational inference framework to approximate posterior distributions.
result The method achieves accurate estimation with significant computational gains.
Contrastive learning recovers latent distributions for ambiguous inputs, including aleatoric uncertainty.
problem Real-world observations often have inherent ambiguities, making the true posterior probabilistic with heteroscedastic uncertainty.
method Extended InfoNCE objective and encoders to predict latent distributions, proving they recover the correct posteriors, including aleatoric uncertainty.
result Contrastive learning encoders can recover the correct posteriors of data-generating processes, including aleatoric uncertainty, up to a rotation of the latent space.
CIPNN model tackles continuous latent variables, solving intractable posterior problems.
problem Solving intractable posterior calculation for continuous latent variables.
method Derives analytical solution for posterior of continuous latent variables, proposes CIPNN and CIPAE.
result CIPNN model demonstrates great classification capability, solving problems for continuous latent variables.
New MCMC methods improve efficiency for large network inference.
problem Efficiency of Metropolis within Gibbs for large networks.
method Combination of split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and Firefly Monte Carlo.
result New methods outperform Metropolis within Gibbs on synthetic and real networks.
Improved Monte-Carlo models by constraining mutual information between latent and observable variables.
problem Training density models leads to latent variables being useless.
method Weave tighter Monte-Carlo bounds with mutual information constraints.
result Improved training of models with continuous and discrete latent variables.
Non-negative tensor factorization models enable predictive analysis on count data. Among them, Bayesian Poisson-Gamma models can derive full posterior distributions of latent factors and are less sensitive to sparse count data. However, current inference methods for these Bayesian models adopt restricted update rules f…
Proposes a method to model uncertainty in neural ordinary differential equations.
problem Lack of uncertainty modeling and robustness in neural ordinary differential equations.
method Introduces a novel approach to model uncertainty by considering a distribution over the end-time of the ODE solver.
result Demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in modelling uncertainty and robustness through experiments.
Variational autoencoders learn distributions of high-dimensional data. They model data with a deep latent-variable model and then fit the model by maximizing a lower bound of the log marginal likelihood. VAEs can capture complex distributions, but they can also suffer from an issue known as "latent variable collapse," …
Accelerates pulsar light curve inference with learned representations and optimization.
problem Computational expense of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for posterior inference.
method Combining U-Net latent representations with local simulator-guided optimization.
result 120x reduction in inference time (24 hours to 12 minutes) with accuracy preserved.
Neural Diffusion Intensity Models simplify Cox processes inference.
problem Intractable nonparametric estimation and posterior inference of latent stochastic intensity in Cox processes.
method Variational framework using neural SDEs, with theoretical guarantee of ELBO maximization coinciding with maximum likelihood estimation.
result Accurate recovery of latent intensity dynamics and posterior paths with significant speedup.
New method infers hidden states in continuous-time phenomena better than traditional models.
problem Traditional HSMM's are limited to discrete time grids and cannot handle irregularly spaced data.
method Formulated integro-differential forward and backward equations for CTSMC's, introduced scalable Viterbi-type algorithm.
result Efficiently solved equations for posterior marginals and path estimates.
Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are scalable and powerful generative models. However, the choice of the variational posterior determines tractability and flexibility of the VAE. Commonly, latent variables are modeled using the normal distribution with a diagonal covariance matrix. This results in computational efficien…
Bayesian models for networks are often misspecified, leading to overconfident inference.
problem Real-world networks violate assumptions of geometry and link function in latent space models.
method Proposes a generalized posterior framework for random geometric graphs, using Link-Sequential R-SafeBayes to adaptively tune posterior regularization.
result Improved calibration and better link prediction performance demonstrated on synthetic and real-world networks.
Data assimilation for subsurface flow using latent diffusion models shows that ensemble Kalman methods may overestimate posterior uncertainty, while Monte Carlo sampling is more reliable.
problem Data assimilation for subsurface flow
method Ensemble Kalman smoother and Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling
result Monte Carlo sampling is more reliable than ensemble Kalman methods
Latent variable time-series models are among the most heavily used tools from machine learning and applied statistics. These models have the advantage of learning latent structure both from noisy observations and from the temporal ordering in the data, where it is assumed that meaningful correlation structure exists ac…
A new method uses compressive autoencoders for image restoration.
problem Efficient regularization of inverse problems in computational imaging.
method Variational Bayes Latent Estimation (VBLE) with compressive autoencoders.
result VBLE achieves similar performance to state-of-the-art PnP methods but faster.
A new method learns latent space normalizing flow for approximate inference in generator models.
problem Approximate inference in generator models with complex posterior distributions.
method Jointly learns latent space normalizing flow and generator model using MCMC-based maximum likelihood.
result The short-run Langevin flow approximates the posterior and aligns with the normalizing flow prior.
Corrects errors in ILA for Bayesian inference in LGMs.
problem Error in ILA for non-Gaussian likelihoods in LGMs.
method Importance sampling scheme to correct ILA errors.
result Corrected posterior converges to the true posterior with increased samples.