Recently, variational approximations such as the mean field approximation have received much interest. We extend the standard mean field method by using an approximating distribution that factorises into cluster potentials. This includes undirected graphs, directed acyclic graphs and junction trees. We derive generaliz…
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48 results for “mean-field variational approximation”
A new particle algorithm improves mean-field variational inference.
problem Efficiently approximating nonparametric posterior distributions in machine learning.
method Introduces PArticle VI (PAVI), a novel particle-based algorithm for nonparametric mean-field approximation.
result Obtains non-asymptotic error bounds for PArticle VI, providing the first end-to-end guarantee for particle-based MFVI.
We conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the mean-field variational inference for approximating posterior distributions in complex Bayesian models that may involve latent variables. We show that the mean-field approximation to the posterior can be well-approximated relative to the Kullback-Leibler divergence discrepancy m…
Liberty or Depth: Deep Bayesian Neural Nets Do Not Need Complex Weight Posterior Approximationscs.LG
Deep Bayesian neural nets can use simpler weight approximations without sacrificing performance.
problem The need for complex weight posterior approximations in deep Bayesian neural networks.
method Theoretical and empirical analysis of mean-field variational inference in deep networks.
result Mean-field variational weight posteriors in deep networks can induce similar function-space distributions as complex approximations in shallower networks.
Extending Mean-Field Variational Inference via Entropic Regularization: Theory and Computationstat.ML
New method improves approximate inference for Bayesian models.
problem Approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models.
method Entropic regularization of mean-field variational inference.
result Improved recovery of true posterior dependency.
Bayesian model selection via mean-field variational approximation improves efficiency and accuracy.
problem Bayesian model selection under model mis-specification and latent variables.
method Mean-field variational approximation with non-asymptotic properties and geometric convergence.
result ELBO tends to select models closer to the true model than BIC as sample size increases.
New method for variational inference without conjugacy constraints.
problem Efficient variational inference with flexible prior and approximation families.
method Wasserstein gradient flow for mean-field approximation.
result Improved convergence and efficiency of variational inference.
The paper studies stability of mean-field variational inference for log-concave distributions.
problem Stability of mean-field variational inference for log-concave distributions.
method Novel approach via linearized optimal transport, lifting non-convex problem to convex optimization over transport maps.
result Dimension-free Lipschitz continuity of the MFVI optimizer with respect to the target distribution, measured in 2-Wasserstein distance.
Compact parameterization improves Bayesian neural network performance.
problem Improving performance of Bayesian neural networks using variational methods.
method Restricting variational distribution to a k-tied Normal distribution with low-rank factorization.
result Compact parameterization improves signal-to-noise ratio and convergence speed.
Geometric framework analyzes bias in variational inference for posterior functionals.
problem Analyzing the bias of posterior functionals under variational approximations.
method Developed a geometric framework to evaluate the bias of posterior functionals using the variational tangent space.
result The leading-order bias of a posterior functional is determined by its component orthogonal to the variational tangent space.
Dynamic trees are mixtures of tree structured belief networks. They solve some of the problems of fixed tree networks at the cost of making exact inference intractable. For this reason approximate methods such as sampling or mean field approaches have been used. However, mean field approximations assume a factorized di…
Mean-field variational methods are widely used for approximate posterior inference in many probabilistic models. In a typical application, mean-field methods approximately compute the posterior with a coordinate-ascent optimization algorithm. When the model is conditionally conjugate, the coordinate updates are easily …
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.
Copula variational inferencestat.ML
We develop a general variational inference method that preserves dependency among the latent variables. Our method uses copulas to augment the families of distributions used in mean-field and structured approximations. Copulas model the dependency that is not captured by the original variational distribution, and thus …
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a high-dimensional Bayesian posterior with a simpler variational distribution by solv…
Beta process is the standard nonparametric Bayesian prior for latent factor model. In this paper, we derive a structured mean-field variational inference algorithm for a beta process non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) model with Poisson likelihood. Unlike the linear Gaussian model, which is well-studied in the non…
DADVI improves ADVI by using deterministic approximation for faster, more accurate posterior estimation.
problem Intractable posterior uncertainty estimates and lack of clear convergence criteria in ADVI.
method Replaces stochastic MFVB objective with deterministic Monte Carlo approximation (SAA) and uses second-order optimization.
result DADVI provides faster and more accurate posterior estimates with default settings.
New method for high-dimensional linear regression using empirical Bayes.
problem Estimating prior in high-dimensional linear regression.
method Variational empirical Bayes approach with NPMLE and mean field approximation.
result Established asymptotic consistency and computational efficiency of the method.
An autonomous variational inference algorithm for arbitrary graphical models requires the ability to optimize variational approximations over the space of model parameters as well as over the choice of tractable families used for the variational approximation. In this paper, we present a novel combination of graph part…
Wide BNNs with odd activations fail to approximate data under mean-field inference.
problem Theoretical limitations of mean-field variational inference in wide, deep Bayesian neural networks.
method Analysis of mean-field variational inference in fully-connected BNNs with odd activation functions and Gaussian likelihood.
result The optimal mean-field variational posterior predictive distribution converges to the prior predictive distribution as network width increases.
Paper introduces f-divergence variational inference for broader application.
problem Variational inference limited to specific divergences.
method Generalizes variational inference to all f-divergences using f-divergence minimization.
result Unified framework for variational inference with arbitrary f-divergences.
Rotates MFVI for better Gaussian approximations.
problem Improving variational approximations for complex distributions.
method Rotated coordinate system, PCA-based rotation, iterative Gaussianization.
result Significantly more accurate approximations with lower computational cost.
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).
The mean field methods, which entail approximating intractable probability distributions variationally with distributions from a tractable family, enjoy high efficiency, guaranteed convergence, and provide lower bounds on the true likelihood. But due to requirement for model-specific derivation of the optimization equa…
Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is its (sometimes severe) underestimates of the uncertainty of model variables and lack of information about model variable covariance.…
Bayesian neural networks ignore data in infinite units limit.
problem Pathological behavior of posterior in over-parameterized networks.
method Mean-field variational inference in infinite hidden units limit.
result Posterior mean converges to zero, ignoring data.
We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived for the mean-field VB approximation, implying that it converges to the sparse tr…
Paper optimizes approximating high-dimensional diffusions by independent coordinates.
problem Optimizing approximations of high-dimensional diffusions by independent coordinates.
method Introduces independent projection as optimal for two criteria.
result Independent projection is optimal for two criteria related to entropy and convergence.
Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model variables (sometimes severely) and provides no information about model variable cova…
Variational Bayes (VB), also known as independent mean-field approximation, has become a popular method for Bayesian network inference in recent years. Its application is vast, e.g. in neural network, compressed sensing, clustering, etc. to name just a few. In this paper, the independence constraint in VB will be relax…
Mean Field Variational Bayesian Inference and Statistical Mechanics of Gaussian Mixture Modelmath.DG
This paper analyzes MFVBI for GMM using statistical mechanics.
problem Approximate fast computation of Gaussian Mixture Model.
method Statistical mechanics and MFVBI applied to GMM.
result Rigorous analysis and mathematical foundation for MFVBI applied to GMM.
MFVI mode collapse explained; RoVI proposed to mitigate.
problem Mode collapse in MFVI for mixture distributions.
method Introducing ε-separateness, deriving bounds, proposing RoVI.
result MFVI optimizers collapse to a single component when components are ε-separated.
We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called -VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of -VB with . When , a novel class of variational inequalities are developed for linking the Bayes risk …
We reinterpret multiplicative noise in neural networks as auxiliary random variables that augment the approximate posterior in a variational setting for Bayesian neural networks. We show that through this interpretation it is both efficient and straightforward to improve the approximation by employing normalizing flows…
Ensemble Kalman Filter improves GPSSM inference for online learning.
problem Non-mean-field variational inference issues in GPSSM.
method Combining EnKF with NMF variational inference.
result Improved online learning performance and data-fitting accuracy.
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.
Topic models are Bayesian models that are frequently used to capture the latent structure of certain corpora of documents or images. Each data element in such a corpus (for instance each item in a collection of scientific articles) is regarded as a convex combination of a small number of vectors corresponding to `topic…
Explaining how overparametrized neural networks simultaneously achieve low risk and zero empirical risk on benchmark datasets is an open problem. PAC-Bayes bounds optimized using variational inference (VI) have been recently proposed as a promising direction in obtaining non-vacuous bounds. We show empirically that thi…
One of the core problems in variational inference is a choice of approximate posterior distribution. It is crucial to trade-off between efficient inference with simple families as mean-field models and accuracy of inference. We propose a variant of a greedy approximation of the posterior distribution with tractable bas…
A new method for efficient Gaussian process inference using sparse approximations.
problem Scalable and accurate inference for latent Gaussian processes.
method Variational approximation with sparse inverse Cholesky factors and double Kullback-Leibler minimization.
result The proposed method can achieve highly accurate approximations with polylogarithmic time complexity.
This work introduces a fixed-point optimization for variational inference.
problem Improving quantified uncertainty in predictions by optimizing a simplified distribution over parameters.
method Projective integral updates for high-dimensional variational inference.
result Efficient quasirandom quadrature sequence for mean-field distributions, leading to quasi-Newton variational Bayes (QNVB).
Paper introduces TSSDMN for modeling dynamic multilayer networks.
problem Capturing temporal and cross-layer dynamics in multilayer networks.
method Tensor State Space Model (TSSDMN) using symmetric Tucker decomposition.
result TSSDMN uniquely captures temporal dynamics within and across layers.
Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model variables (sometimes severely) and provides no information about model variable cova…
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.
A tutorial on variational inference for high-dimensional models.
problem Approximating marginal likelihood and posterior in Bayesian models.
method Parametric approach to variational inference.
result Variational inference is now preferred for high-dimensional models and large datasets.
Marginal MAP problems are notoriously difficult tasks for graphical models. We derive a general variational framework for solving marginal MAP problems, in which we apply analogues of the Bethe, tree-reweighted, and mean field approximations. We then derive a "mixed" message passing algorithm and a convergent alternati…
The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference, focusing on mean-field or other simple structured approximations. This restricti…
Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This requires the ability to integrate a sum of terms in the log joint likelihood using …