A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Survey of methods for solving smooth stochastic variational inequalities.
New framework improves stochastic optimization for variational inference.
Paper proposes a second-order method for faster SVI convergence.
Derives optimal control conditions using calculus of variations.
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…
This paper provides a unifying theoretical framework for stochastic optimization algorithms by means of a latent stochastic variational problem. Using techniques from stochastic control, the solution to the variational problem is shown to be equivalent to that of a Forward Backward Stochastic Differential Equation (FBS…
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…
This paper develops scalable control variates for Monte Carlo methods using stochastic optimization.
Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the tedious process of deriving analytical expressions for closed-form variable updates…
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…
Improves understanding of stochastic NGVI convergence rates.
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of draws from the variational distribution. The algorithm provably converges to a stat…
This paper presents a novel variational inference framework for deriving a family of Bayesian sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models whose approximations are variationally optimal with respect to the full-rank GPR model enriched with various corresponding correlation structures of the observation noises. Our …
New guarantees for black-box variational inference methods.
A new method for efficient Gaussian process regression reduces complexity and improves scalability.
Proposes VSGD optimizer combining probabilistic and gradient-based methods.
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient descent, using Monte Carlo approximation for the gradients. This enables variatio…
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…
Unified approach for first-order methods with Markovian noise in stochastic optimization and variational inequalities.
Unified approach for Bayesian optimal experiment design using stochastic gradients.
We extend Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes to perform posterior inference for the weights of Stick-Breaking processes. This development allows us to define a Stick-Breaking Variational Autoencoder (SB-VAE), a Bayesian nonparametric version of the variational autoencoder that has a latent representation with stocha…
Total variation minimization clusters partially labeled data points.
DSVNP uses global and local latent variables for improved neural process predictions.
Solves wealth maximization problem using variational analysis.
While much research effort has been dedicated to scaling up sparse Gaussian process (GP) models based on inducing variables for big data, little attention is afforded to the other less explored class of low-rank GP approximations that exploit the sparse spectral representation of a GP kernel. This paper presents such a…
Stochastic optimization techniques are standard in variational inference algorithms. These methods estimate gradients by approximating expectations with independent Monte Carlo samples. In this paper, we explore a technique that uses correlated, but more representative , samples to reduce estimator variance. Specifical…
Stochastic Bayesian Neural Network improves scalability and performance.
New algorithms solve stochastic variational inequalities without bounded variance assumption.
We discuss the probabilistic properties of the variation based third and fourth moments of financial returns as estimators of the actual moments of the return distributions. The moment variations are defined under non-parametric assumptions with quadratic variation method but for the computational tractability, we use …
New algorithms reduce variance in solving complex mathematical problems.
We introduce incremental variational inference and apply it to latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Incremental variational inference is inspired by incremental EM and provides an alternative to stochastic variational inference. Incremental LDA can process massive document collections, does not require to set a learning …
New algorithm uses control variates to improve multi-armed bandit performance.
Paper introduces a new method for generating diverse human motion predictions.
New method reduces variance in complex probabilistic model optimization.
A financial swap reduces skew and fat tails in a portfolio's performance.
A scalable GPLVM model using stochastic variational inference.
Novel framework discovers SPDEs from limited data.
Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these methods typically only apply to conditionally-conjugate models. We present a new s…
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a typically non-convex objective function is locally optimized over the parameters of t…
New method efficiently computes gradients for stochastic differential equations.
VSDN models sporadic time series with neural SDEs.
We develop a variational framework for SDEs driven by fractional noise.
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional stochastic optimization methods, SVI takes precautions to use unbiased stochastic g…
Bayesian inference using stochastic neural networks ensembles.
Stochastic variational inference allows for fast posterior inference in complex Bayesian models. However, the algorithm is prone to local optima which can make the quality of the posterior approximation sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters and initialization. We address this problem by replacing the natural gradi…
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 …
Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational Bayesian neural networks (fBNNs), which maximize an Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) defi…
Bayesian method approximates intractable stochastic programs with chance constraints.