arXiv Statistics ML

A Computable Measure of Suboptimality for Entropy-Regularised Variational Objectives

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 AI
Jun 16

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606. 16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration.

By M. Berk Sahin, Ahmet Ege Tanriverdi, Behzad Sharif, Abolfazl Hashemi
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
Oct 9

Barron Optimal Transport I: Generative Modeling

The paper introduces a new optimal transport framework that uses the Barron energy—an intrinsic neural network complexity measure—instead of the traditional kinetic energy. By modeling transport as deep residual networks that map a reference distribution to a target distribution, the authors define a new metric on probability measures and analyze its properties for generative modeling. They demonstrate that diffusion generative models are suboptimal in this Barron geometry and explore how adaptivity can improve alternative generative approaches.

By Evan Dogariu, Joan Bruna
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