arXiv research

Variational inference is a powerful tool for approximate inference. However, it mainly focuses on the evidence lower bound as variational objective and the development of other measures for variational inference is a promising area of research. This paper proposes a robust modification of evidence and a lower bound for…

Stochastic Bayesian Neural Network improves scalability and performance.

This paper introduces a method to estimate log-likelihood in VAE models.

The standard interpretation of importance-weighted autoencoders is that they maximize a tighter lower bound on the marginal likelihood than the standard evidence lower bound. We give an alternate interpretation of this procedure: that it optimizes the standard variational lower bound, but using a more complex distribut…

The natural gradient of ELBO vanishes in unconstrained optimization, simplifying learning.

Develops ELBD for efficient feature selection in VAE latent variables.

The paper calculates the index and nullity of Fraser-Sargent surfaces and provides bounds.

Paper improves VAEs using Monte Carlo methods.

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as the surrogate loss. This evidence upper bound (EUBO) equals to the log marginal li…

Revisits Gaussian process model with spherical harmonics for scalable deep learning.

We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for estimating the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in Variational Bayes. In this work, …

Recent work in unsupervised representation learning has focused on learning deep directed latent-variable models. Fitting these models by maximizing the marginal likelihood or evidence is typically intractable, thus a common approximation is to maximize the evidence lower bound (ELBO) instead. However, maximum likeliho…

Gaussian processes (GP) provide a prior over functions and allow finding complex regularities in data. Gaussian processes are successfully used for classification/regression problems and dimensionality reduction. In this work we consider the classification problem only. The complexity of standard methods for GP-classif…

New SQ lower bounds show learning mixtures of bounded covariance Gaussians is hard.

In Bayesian machine learning, the posterior distribution is typically computationally intractable, hence variational inference is often required. In this approach, an evidence lower bound on the log likelihood of data is maximized during training. Variational Autoencoders (VAE) are one important example where variation…

This paper improves SAM by reformulating it as a bilevel optimization problem.

In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these algorithms perform in "typical" scenarios, or how far the best known theoretical…

Paper conjectures Links-Gould invariant generalizes Alexander polynomial.

Improved lower bounds for faithful linear representations of mapping class groups.

Statistical Query lower bound shows difficulty in list-decodable linear regression.

Optimal SQ bounds for learning binary product distributions and Ising models.

This work gives an in-depth derivation of the trainable evidence lower bound obtained from the marginal joint log-Likelihood with the goal of training a Multi-Modal Variational Autoencoder (M$^2$VAE).

LPF provides formal guarantees for aggregating multi-evidence in probabilistic tasks.

New method learns complex, multimodal distributions in ADVI.

We propose a new Bayesian Neural Net formulation that affords variational inference for which the evidence lower bound is analytically tractable subject to a tight approximation. We achieve this tractability by (i) decomposing ReLU nonlinearities into the product of an identity and a Heaviside step function, (ii) intro…

Paper proves first non-trivial PTF testing lower bounds for NGCA.

A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both in ease of implementation and automatically tuning of the sampler parameters to …

In the context of sparse principal component detection, we bring evidence towards the existence of a statistical price to pay for computational efficiency. We measure the performance of a test by the smallest signal strength that it can detect and we propose a computationally efficient method based on semidefinite prog…

Generative models produce realistic objects in many domains, including text, image, video, and audio synthesis. Most popular models---Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)---usually employ a standard Gaussian distribution as a prior. Previous works show that the richer family of pri…

When used as a surrogate objective for maximum likelihood estimation in latent variable models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) produces state-of-the-art results. Inspired by this, we consider the extension of the ELBO to a family of lower bounds defined by a particle filter's estimator of the marginal likelihood, the …

The study establishes SQ lower bounds for learning halfspaces and ReLUs under Gaussian marginals.

We offer a novel view of AdaBoost in a statistical setting. We propose a Bayesian model for binary classification in which label noise is modeled hierarchically. Using variational inference to optimize a dynamic evidence lower bound, we derive a new boosting-like algorithm called VIBoost. We show its close connections …

New algorithm for shareable arms with load-dependent rewards in stochastic bandits.

A new diffusion model tackles brightness issues with a probabilistic approach.

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational parameter space is Euclidean, which hinders the potential broad application of VB me…

We propose a simple and general variant of the standard reparameterized gradient estimator for the variational evidence lower bound. Specifically, we remove a part of the total derivative with respect to the variational parameters that corresponds to the score function. Removing this term produces an unbiased gradient …

Online method for state estimation and parameter learning in SSMs.

New reweighted losses improve diffusion model training and image quality.

Linear independence testing is a fundamental information-theoretic and statistical problem that can be posed as follows: given $n$ points $\{(X_i,Y_i)\}^n_{i=1}$ from a $p+q$ dimensional multivariate distribution where $X_i \in \mathbb{R}^p$ and $Y_i \in\mathbb{R}^q$, determine whether $a^T X$ and $b^T Y$ are uncorrela…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density function, explicit or not, as long as independent random samples can be generat…

We present the first framework for Gaussian-process-modulated Poisson processes when the temporal data appear in the form of panel counts. Panel count data frequently arise when experimental subjects are observed only at discrete time points and only the numbers of occurrences of the events between subsequent observati…

New SQ lower bound shows complexity nearly matches known upper bound for smoothed agnostic learning.

New evidence shows computational barriers in graphon estimation using low-degree polynomials.

We introduce the thermodynamic variational objective (TVO) for learning in both continuous and discrete deep generative models. The TVO arises from a key connection between variational inference and thermodynamic integration that results in a tighter lower bound to the log marginal likelihood than the standard variatio…

The Poisson model is frequently employed to describe count data, but in a Bayesian context it leads to an analytically intractable posterior probability distribution. In this work, we analyze a variational Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution arising from the Poisson model with a Gaussian prior. This is…

This work improves VAEs using MCMC methods for better variational bounds.

New method explains computational barriers in high-dimensional statistical models.

Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured via a divergence $D(q || p)$ from $q$ to $p$. While successful, this approach al…