Variational inference transforms posterior inference into parametric optimization thereby enabling the use of latent variable models where otherwise impractical. However, variational inference can be finicky when different variational parameters control variables that are strongly correlated under the model. Traditiona…
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48 results for “Parameter variation”
TM-VI uses flexible transformation models to approximate complex posteriors in Bayesian models.
problem Approximating complex posteriors in Bayesian models with limited flexibility.
method Transformation models for variational inference (TM-VI).
result TM-VI allows accurate approximation of complex posteriors in models with one parameter and works in a mean-field fashion for multi-parameter models.
This work proposes a new method for variational inference using Wasserstein gradient descent.
problem Optimizing variational parameters to match a true posterior distribution.
method Reinterpreting VI as an optimization problem over a variational parameter space, using Wasserstein gradient descent.
result The proposed Wasserstein gradient descent can be seen as a generalization of existing optimization techniques in VI.
A new meta-learning method using shared variational inference.
problem Meta-learning with uncertainty over model parameters.
method Shared amortized variational inference network for conditional prior and posterior.
result Prevents collapse of conditional prior to Dirac delta function.
This work uses variational inference to estimate parameters of opinion dynamics models.
problem Challenges in parameter estimation for ABMs of social phenomena.
method Transformed ABM parameter estimation into an optimization problem using variational inference.
result Estimates parameters more accurately than simulation-based and MCMC methods.
Online method for state estimation and parameter learning in SSMs.
problem State estimation and parameter learning in state-space models.
method Stochastic gradient optimization of variational lower bound, using backward decompositions and Bellman recursions.
result Ability to operate online without revisiting historic observations.
Mixed Variational Inferencestat.ML
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies. Variational approaches avoid this issue by explicitly minimising the Kullback-Leibler…
Improved DP-SGD for variational inference reduces noise and variance.
problem Poor convergence and high variance in variational parameter outputs due to gradient noise in DP-SGD.
method Introduced aligned gradients and iterate averaging to reduce DP-induced noise, and noise-aware posteriors.
result Less noisy gradient estimator and improved parameter estimates for variational inference.
Solves wealth maximization problem using variational analysis.
problem Maximizing expected utility of terminal wealth.
method Variational analysis, forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE).
result Characterization and solutions for various utility functions.
Paper introduces a new method to model epidemic dynamics with varying parameters.
problem Capturing discontinuous variations in epidemic model parameters.
method Total variation regularization with Iterated Nelder--Mead optimization.
result The method accurately models epidemic dynamics with instant changes.
We apply variational inference to learn vehicle trajectory parameters from noisy data.
problem Learning parameters for vehicle trajectory estimation from noisy measurements.
method Gaussian variational inference with parameter learning in a motion and sensor model context.
result High-quality state estimates achieved even with outliers and false loop closures.
We propose a framework that directly tackles the probability distribution of the value function parameters in Deep Q Network (DQN), with powerful variational inference subroutines to approximate the posterior of the parameters. We will establish the equivalence between our proposed surrogate objective and variational i…
A new method reduces complexity and uncertainty in neural networks.
problem Uncertainty quantification in complex neural networks.
method Condensed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (cSVGD) method.
result Condensed SVGD provides uncertainty quantification on parameters.
Method for initializing Gaussian mixtures for variational inference with multi-modal distributions.
problem Challenges in variational inference with Gaussian mixtures due to multimodality and nonconvex loss functions.
method Optimization to find local maxima, local Gaussian approximations, and constrained least squares regression.
result Robust initialization improves variational inference performance and scalability.
This paper presents sampling-based speech parameter generation using moment-matching networks for Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based speech synthesis. Although people never produce exactly the same speech even if we try to express the same linguistic and para-linguistic information, typical statistical speech synthesis pr…
Amortized variational inference (AVI) replaces instance-specific local inference with a global inference network. While AVI has enabled efficient training of deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAE), recent empirical work suggests that inference networks can produce suboptimal variational parameter…
Improves scalability and efficiency of mixture models in black-box variational inference.
problem Scaling mixture models in black-box variational inference leads to high parameter and time costs.
method Introduces MISVAE for amortized mixture parameter space and new ELBO estimators.
result Achieves superior estimation performance with fewer parameters and shorter inference time.
Proposes a new method for continual learning in neural networks.
problem Challenges in applying sequential Bayesian inference to neural networks.
method Sequential function-space variational inference.
result Neural networks trained with the proposed method achieve better predictive accuracy.
The paper develops scalable variational inference for Bayesian neural networks under model and parameter uncertainty.
problem Combining structural and parameter uncertainties in scalable Bayesian neural networks.
method Adapted variational inference with reparametrization for model space constraints.
result Comparable accuracy with sparse inference compared to ordinary BNNs.
Parameter inference for stochastic differential equations is challenging due to the presence of a latent diffusion process. Working with an Euler-Maruyama discretisation for the diffusion, we use variational inference to jointly learn the parameters and the diffusion paths. We use a standard mean-field variational appr…
The recognition network in deep latent variable models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) relies on amortized inference for efficient posterior approximation that can scale up to large datasets. However, this technique has also been demonstrated to select suboptimal variational parameters, often resulting in consi…
Variational Laplace improves Bayesian neural networks performance.
problem Improving Bayesian neural networks performance.
method Develops variational Laplace for BNNs, exploiting curvature of likelihood.
result Variational Laplace outperforms other inference methods.
Bayesian state and parameter estimation for nonlinear models using variational methods.
problem Estimating states and parameters for nonlinear state-space models.
method Variational approach to approximate the intractable Bayesian distribution, resulting in an optimisation problem.
result The proposed method efficiently computes Bayesian estimates for nonlinear models, outperforming Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in numerical examples.
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to find the member of this family that most closely approximates the exact posterior…
Improves learning of spectral mixture kernels with approximate Bayesian inference.
problem Difficult optimization of large number of SM kernel parameters.
method Approximate Bayesian inference using variational distribution of spectral points and random Fourier features.
result Accelerates convergence and leads to better optimal parameters.
A recent novel extension of multi-output Gaussian processes handles heterogeneous outputs assuming that each output has its own likelihood function. It uses a vector-valued Gaussian process prior to jointly model all likelihoods' parameters as latent functions drawn from a Gaussian process with a linear model of coregi…
Variational Laplace improves Bayesian neural network performance without sampling.
problem Improving Bayesian neural network performance and calibration.
method Develops a new variational Laplace method for BNNs, exploiting curvature of likelihood.
result Variational Laplace outperforms standard VI methods in test performance and calibration.
Proposes an amortized variational framework for Deep Q Networks.
problem Efficient exploration in deep reinforcement learning.
method Amortized variational inference for action value function approximation.
result Significantly less learning parameters and better performance.
Bayesian surrogate models reduce uncertainty in high-dimensional design optimisation problems.
problem Uncertainty in high-dimensional inputs for complex computational models.
method Variational Bayesian inference for constructing statistical surrogates with Gaussian process priors and KL divergence for approximation.
result The RDVGP surrogate provides accurate and versatile approximations for robust structural optimisation.
A scalable method for accurate inference of low-dimensional parameters in high-dimensional linear regression.
problem Statistical inference for low-dimensional parameters in high-dimensional linear regression models.
method Mean-field variational Bayes approach, focusing on nuisance parameters and conditional distributions.
result Competitive numerical performance and theoretical guarantees for estimation and uncertainty quantification.
We introduce local expectation gradients which is a general purpose stochastic variational inference algorithm for constructing stochastic gradients through sampling from the variational distribution. This algorithm divides the problem of estimating the stochastic gradients over multiple variational parameters into sma…
We focus on the maximum regularization parameter for anisotropic total-variation denoising. It corresponds to the minimum value of the regularization parameter above which the solution remains constant. While this value is well know for the Lasso, such a critical value has not been investigated in details for the total…
Paper uses variational inference to estimate nonlinear models.
problem Parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models.
method Variational inference approach for nonlinear state-space models.
result The method provides robust parameter estimates and outperforms alternatives.
Improves SVGP methods for faster and more accurate Gaussian process inference.
problem Efficient non-conjugate Gaussian process inference.
method Dual parameterization of SVGP methods using site parameters.
result Faster and more accurate inference with tighter evidence lower bound.
PAVI speeds up VI for large-scale studies by sharing parameterization across i.i.d. variables.
problem Challenges in Bayesian inference for large population studies with many latent parameters.
method Designing plate-amortized variational inference (PAVI) to share parameterization across i.i.d. variables.
result Significant speedup in training large-scale hierarchical variational distributions.
Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to posterior densities on model parameters. In this note, we review the main variants of …
Bidirectional VAE reduces parameters and improves image tasks.
problem Improving image reconstruction, classification, interpolation, and generation.
method Uses a single neural network for both encoding and decoding in both forward and backward directions.
result Bidirectional VAEs reduce parameters by almost 50% and slightly outperform unidirectional VAEs.
We derive a novel variational expectation maximization approach based on truncated posterior distributions. Truncated distributions are proportional to exact posteriors within subsets of a discrete state space and equal zero otherwise. The treatment of the distributions' subsets as variational parameters distinguishes …
A scalable method for efficient inference in Gaussian process regression networks.
problem Intractable inference in Gaussian process regression networks (GPRN).
method Tensorization of output space, tensor/matrix-normal variational posteriors, joint optimization, and exploiting Kronecker product structure.
result Captures posterior dependencies and improves inference quality for large number of outputs.
EVCL combines VCL and EWC to prevent forgetting new tasks.
problem Preventing catastrophic forgetting in continual learning.
method Hybrid model integrating VCL and EWC.
result Consistently outperforms baselines in learning new tasks.
We introduce the Variational Holder (VH) bound as an alternative to Variational Bayes (VB) for approximate Bayesian inference. Unlike VB which typically involves maximization of a non-convex lower bound with respect to the variational parameters, the VH bound involves minimization of a convex upper bound to the intract…
Efficiently identifies important variables in binary outcomes using variational Bayes.
problem Bayesian variable selection for binary outcomes with computational challenges.
method Mean-field variational Bayes approximation with closed-form updates and efficient inference algorithm.
result Successfully identifies important variables and is orders of magnitude faster than MCMC.
New algorithm speeds up large-scale statistical inference.
problem Efficiently solving large-scale mean-field variational inference problems.
method Developed a novel primal-dual algorithm (PD-VI) and a block-preconditioned extension (PD-VI) for mean-field variational inference.
result PD-VI and PD-VI achieve faster convergence and better solution quality compared to existing methods.
Stochastic variational inference (SVI), the state-of-the-art algorithm for scaling variational inference to large-datasets, is inherently serial. Moreover, it requires the parameters to fit in the memory of a single processor; this is problematic when the number of parameters is in billions. In this paper, we propose e…
Amortized inference allows latent-variable models trained via variational learning to scale to large datasets. The quality of approximate inference is determined by two factors: a) the capacity of the variational distribution to match the true posterior and b) the ability of the recognition network to produce good vari…
HyperVAE encodes distributions of distributions using variational inference.
problem Modeling distributions of distributions efficiently and preserving information.
method Variational inference with Gaussian mixture models and matrix-network decoders.
result HyperVAE encodes parameters of a VAE in a low-dimensional Gaussian distribution, preserving more information.
AutoBayes simplifies variational inference by composing models and optimizing them.
problem Generalized variational inference complexities and optimization challenges.
method Compositional framework exploiting chain rules for automatic differentiation.
result Optimized models and parameterized statistical games can be locally optimized.
A new method for Bayesian inference in high dimensions using projected Stein variational gradient descent.
problem Bayesian inference challenges in high-dimensional data.
method Adapting Stein variational gradient descent to exploit intrinsic low dimensionality of data.
result pSVGD is more accurate and efficient than SVGD, especially in high-dimensional settings.