arXiv Machine Learning By Jinlin Lai, Antonio Linero, Yuling Yao

Predictive variational inference: Learn the predictively optimal posterior distribution

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

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
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
Aug 28

A Flexible Empirical Bayes Approach to Generalized Linear Models, with Applications to Sparse Logistic Regression

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