arXiv Machine Learning

Flow-Transformed Implicit Processes for Function-Space Variational Inference

arXiv:2606. 01954v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit-process priors define distributions over functions through flexible generative mechanisms, making them attractive for Bayesian function-space modelling.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Implicit Variational Rejection Sampling

arXiv:2606. 14235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational Inference (VI) is a fundamental inference technique in Bayesian machine learning for approximating complex posterior distributions.

By Jian Xu, Shigui Li, Wei Chen, Jiacheng Li, Zhiqi Lin, Delu Zeng, Xinghao Ding, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A Generalized Tangent Approximation based Variational Inference Framework for Strongly Super-Gaussian Likelihoods

The paper introduces a new variational inference framework that uses tangent transformations to handle strongly super‑Gaussian likelihoods across a wide range of probability models. By constructing tangent minorants of the log‑likelihood through convex duality, the method achieves conjugacy with Gaussian priors, enabling tractable inference where traditional approaches struggle. The authors provide algorithmic convergence guarantees and near‑parametric risk bounds, and demonstrate superior scalability and accuracy on both simulated and real‑world datasets compared to existing variational algorithms.

By Somjit Roy, Pritam Dey, Debdeep Pati, Bani K. Mallick
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Neural Variational Cut Posteriors without Upstream Data

The paper introduces NeVI‑Cut, a modular variational inference method for cut‑Bayes that does not require access to upstream data or models. It approximates the cut‑posterior by minimizing the expected downstream conditional Kullback‑Leibler divergence, using conditional normalizing flows as the variational family. The authors provide fixed‑data convergence rates, establish uniform KL approximation results for flow classes, and demonstrate the algorithm’s speed and accuracy on several applications.

By Jiafang Song, Sandipan Pramanik, Abhirup Datta
arXiv AI
Jul 20

Energy-based Transport for Amortized Bayesian Inference

arXiv:2605. 15407v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider amortized Bayesian inference for nonlinear inverse problems using only samples from the joint distribution of parameters and observations, including problems with unknown functions in a Banach space.

By Ricardo Baptista, Hojjat Kaveh, Andrew M. Stuart
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

GFlowNets and variational inference

arXiv:2210.00580v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically used to m...

By Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Salem Lahlou, Tristan Deleu, Xu Ji, Edward Hu, Katie Everett, Dinghuai Zhang, Yoshua Bengio