Mean Field Variational Inference (MFVI) is widely understood to underestimate posterior variance. By analysing conjugate Bayesian Linear Regression (BLR), we show that this characterization is incomplete: while MFVI underestimates the variance in parameter space, it can overestimate the predictive variance compared to the exact posterior.
arXiv:2410. 14843v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification.
By Jinlin Lai, Antonio Linero, Yuling Yao
arXiv:2606. 25882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: DGPs are probabilistic models with remarkable prediction performance that concatenate GPs across several layers.
By Francisco Javier S\'aez-Maldonado, Juan Maro\~nas, Daniel Hern\'andez-Lobato
arXiv:2608.29349v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Gaussian process (GP) regression with a single global GP (GP-glo) incurs cubic computational cost, limiting scalability to large datasets. Product-of-e...
By Yean Hoon Ong, Paolo Barucca, Wei Pan, Jun Wang
arXiv:2607. 25376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Bayesian neural networks (BNNs), variational inference is a widely adopted framework for modeling uncertainty in a distributional way, with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) serving as the standard objective function.
By Pei-Hsuan Hsia, Lars H. Heyen, Arvid Weyrauch, Markus Goetz, Achim Streit, Sebastian Krumscheid, Charlotte Debus
The paper presents a tuning‑free empirical Bayes framework for Bayesian generalized linear models that uses a novel mean‑field variational inference algorithm. By estimating the prior within the VI procedure and optimizing the posterior mean directly, the method reduces optimization complexity and supports scalable solvers like L‑BFGS and stochastic gradient descent. Applied to sparse logistic regression, the approach shows superior predictive performance compared to existing methods.
By Dongyue Xie, Matthew Stephens