In this paper, the problem of state estimation, in the context of both filtering and smoothing, for nonlinear state-space models is considered. Due to the nonlinear nature of the models, the state estimation problem is generally intractable as it involves integrals of general nonlinear functions and the filtered and smoothed state distributions lack closed-form solutions. As such, it is common to approximate the state estimation problem. In this paper, we develop an assumed Gaussian solution based on variational inference, which offers the key advantage of a flexible, but principled, mechanism for approximating the required distributions. Our main contribution lies in a new formulation of the state estimation problem as an optimisation problem, which can then be solved using standard optimisation routines that employ exact first- and second-order derivatives. The resulting state estimation approach involves a minimal number of assumptions and applies directly to nonlinear systems with both Gaussian and non-Gaussian probabilistic models. The performance of our approach is demonstrated on several examples; a challenging scalar system, a model of a simple robotic system, and a target tracking problem using a von Mises-Fisher distribution and outperforms alternative assumed Gaussian approaches to state estimation.
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a generative model with continuous latent variables where a pair of probabilistic encoder (bottom-up) and decoder (top-down) is jointly learned by stochastic gradient variational Bayes. We first elaborate Gaussian VAE, approximating the local covariance matrix of the decoder as an outer product of the principal direction at a position determined by a sample drawn from Gaussian distribution. We show that this model, referred to as VAE-ROC, better captures the data manifold, compared to the standard Gaussian VAE where independent multivariate Gaussian was use…
Kogakuin University of Technology and Engineering（工学院大学）
Finite mixture models, typically Gaussian mixtures, are well known and widely used as model-based clustering. In practical situations, there are many non-Gaussian data that are heavy-tailed and/or asymmetric. Normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) distributions are normal-variance mean which mixing densities are inverse Gaussian distributions and can be used for both haavy-tail and asymmetry. For NIG mixture models, both expectation-maximization method and variational Bayesian (VB) algorithms have been proposed. However, the existing VB algorithm for NIG mixture have a disadvantage that the shape of th…
Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower bound on the desired integral to be approximated, e.g. marginal likelihood. The lower bound is then optimised with respect to its free parameters, the so called variational parameters. However, this is not always possible as for certain integrals it is very challenging (or tedious) to come up with a suitable lower bound. Here we propose a simple scheme that ov…
Variational inference (VI) combined with Bayesian nonlinear filtering produces state-of-the-art results for latent time-series modeling. A body of recent work has focused on sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and its variants, e.g., forward filtering backward simulation (FFBSi). Although these studies have succeeded, serious problems remain in particle degeneracy and biased gradient estimators. In this paper, we propose Ensemble Kalman Variational Objective (EnKO), a hybrid method of VI and the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), to infer state space models (SSMs). Our proposed method can efficiently ide…
In this paper, we develop an unsupervised generative clustering framework that combines the Variational Information Bottleneck and the Gaussian Mixture Model. Specifically, in our approach, we use the Variational Information Bottleneck method and model the latent space as a mixture of Gaussians. We derive a bound on the cost function of our model that generalizes the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) and provide a variational inference type algorithm that allows computing it. In the algorithm, the coders' mappings are parametrized using neural networks, and the bound is approximated by Monte Carlo s…
Gaussian process (GP) models form a core part of probabilistic machine learning. Considerable research effort has been made into attacking three issues with GP models: how to compute efficiently when the number of data is large; how to approximate the posterior when the likelihood is not Gaussian and how to estimate covariance function parameter posteriors. This paper simultaneously addresses these, using a variational approximation to the posterior which is sparse in support of the function but otherwise free-form. The result is a Hybrid Monte-Carlo sampling scheme which allows for a non-Gaus…
Parameter estimation for model-based clustering using a finite mixture of normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) distributions is achieved through variational Bayes approximations. Univariate NIG mixtures and multivariate NIG mixtures are considered. The use of variational Bayes approximations here is a substantial departure from the traditional EM approach and alleviates some of the associated computational complexities and uncertainties. Our variational algorithm is applied to simulated and real data. The paper concludes with discussion and suggestions for future work.
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Institute for Aerospace Studies（航空航天研究所）
This short note reviews so-called Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) for multivariate Gaussians. The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is derived for several different parameterizations of Gaussians. Careful attention is paid to the symmetric nature of the covariance matrix when calculating derivatives. We show that there are some advantages to choosing a parameterization comprising the mean and inverse covariance matrix and provide a simple NGD update that accounts for the symmetric (and sparse) nature of the inverse covariance matrix.
We propose a new variational inference algorithm for learning in Gaussian Process State-Space Models (GPSSMs). Our algorithm enables learning of unstable and partially observable systems, where previous algorithms fail. Our main algorithmic contribution is a novel approximate posterior that can be calculated efficiently using a single forward and backward pass along the training trajectories. The forward-backward pass is inspired on Kalman smoothing for linear dynamical systems but generalizes to GPSSMs. Our second contribution is a modification of the conditioning step that effectively lowers…
Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are widely used in statistics and machine learning. Bayesian inference in non-conjugate LGMs is difficult due to intractable integrals involving the Gaussian prior and non-conjugate likelihoods. Algorithms based on variational Gaussian (VG) approximations are widely employed since they strike a favorable balance between accuracy, generality, speed, and ease of use. However, the structure of the optimization problems associated with these approximations remains poorly understood, and standard solvers take too long to converge. We derive a novel dual variational inf…
We develop flexible methods of deriving variational inference for models with complex latent variable structure. By splitting the variables in these models into "global" parameters and "local" latent variables, we define a class of variational approximations that exploit this partitioning and go beyond Gaussian variational approximation. This approximation is motivated by the fact that in many hierarchical models, there are global variance parameters which determine the scale of local latent variables in their posterior conditional on the global parameters. We also consider parsimonious parame…
The cumulative shrinkage process is an increasing shrinkage prior that can be employed within models in which additional terms are supposed to play a progressively negligible role. A natural application is to Gaussian factor models, where such a process has proved effective in inducing parsimonious representations while providing accurate inference on the data covariance matrix. The cumulative shrinkage process came with an adaptive Gibbs sampler that tunes the number of latent factors throughout iterations, which makes it faster than the non-adaptive Gibbs sampler. In this work we propose a v…
Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) can model complex marginal densities as well as complex mappings. Non-Gaussian marginals are essential for modelling real-world data, and can be generated from the DGP by incorporating uncorrelated variables to the model. Previous work on DGP models has introduced noise additively and used variational inference with a combination of sparse Gaussian processes and mean-field Gaussians for the approximate posterior. Additive noise attenuates the signal, and the Gaussian form of variational distribution may lead to an inaccurate posterior. We instead incorporate nois…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Institute for Robotics Intelligent Machines（机器人与智能机器研究所）
Large-scale Gaussian process inference has long faced practical challenges due to time and space complexity that is superlinear in dataset size. While sparse variational Gaussian process models are capable of learning from large-scale data, standard strategies for sparsifying the model can prevent the approximation of complex functions. In this work, we propose a novel variational Gaussian process model that decouples the representation of mean and covariance functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We show that this new parametrization generalizes previous models. Furthermore, it yields…
Generalized additive models (GAMs) are a widely used class of models of interest to statisticians as they provide a flexible way to design interpretable models of data beyond linear models. We here propose a scalable and well-calibrated Bayesian treatment of GAMs using Gaussian processes (GPs) and leveraging recent advances in variational inference. We use sparse GPs to represent each component and exploit the additive structure of the model to efficiently represent a Gaussian a posteriori coupling between the components.
We develop a scalable deep non-parametric generative model by augmenting deep Gaussian processes with a recognition model. Inference is performed in a novel scalable variational framework where the variational posterior distributions are reparametrized through a multilayer perceptron. The key aspect of this reformulation is that it prevents the proliferation of variational parameters which otherwise grow linearly in proportion to the sample size. We derive a new formulation of the variational lower bound that allows us to distribute most of the computation in a way that enables to handle datas…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；ETAS GmbH（ETAS有限公司）
Modeling sequential data has become more and more important in practice. Some applications are autonomous driving, virtual sensors and weather forecasting. To model such systems, so called recurrent models are frequently used. In this paper we introduce several new Deep recurrent Gaussian process (DRGP) models based on the Sparse Spectrum Gaussian process (SSGP) and the improved version, called variational Sparse Spectrum Gaussian process (VSSGP). We follow the recurrent structure given by an existing DRGP based on a specific variational sparse Nyström approximation, the recurrent Gaussian pro…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a powerful class of deep generative latent variable model for unsupervised representation learning on high-dimensional data. To ensure computational tractability, VAEs are often implemented with a univariate standard Gaussian prior and a mean-field Gaussian variational posterior distribution. This results in a vector-valued latent variables that are agnostic to the original data structure which might be highly correlated across and within multiple dimensions. We propose a tensor-variate extension to the VAE framework, the tensor-variate Gaussian process prio…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Sheffield, UK（英国谢菲尔德）
This paper introduces a method to approximate Gaussian process regression by representing the problem as a stochastic differential equation and using variational inference to approximate solutions. The approximations are compared with full GP regression and generated paths are demonstrated to be indistinguishable from GP samples. We show that the approach extends easily to non-linear dynamics and discuss extensions to which the approach can be easily applied.
We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive for these situations, but the parametric assumptions required for efficient variational inference (VI) result in incorrect inference when they encounter the multi-modal posterior distributions that are common for such models. SVGD provides a non-parametric alternative to variational inference which is substantially faster than MCMC. We prove that for GP mod…
With a principled representation of uncertainty and closed form posterior updates, Gaussian processes (GPs) are a natural choice for online decision making. However, Gaussian processes typically require at least $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ computations for $n$ training points, limiting their general applicability. Stochastic variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) can provide scalable inference for a dataset of fixed size, but are difficult to efficiently condition on new data. We propose online variational conditioning (OVC), a procedure for efficiently conditioning SVGPs in an online setting that does…
The use of Gaussian process models is typically limited to datasets with a few tens of thousands of observations due to their complexity and memory footprint. The two most commonly used methods to overcome this limitation are 1) the variational sparse approximation which relies on inducing points and 2) the state-space equivalent formulation of Gaussian processes which can be seen as exploiting some sparsity in the precision matrix. We propose to take the best of both worlds: we show that the inducing point framework is still valid for state space models and that it can bring further computati…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；RIKEN Center for AI Project（理化学研究所人工智能项目中心）
Sparse variational Gaussian process (SVGP) methods are a common choice for non-conjugate Gaussian process inference because of their computational benefits. In this paper, we improve their computational efficiency by using a dual parameterization where each data example is assigned dual parameters, similarly to site parameters used in expectation propagation. Our dual parameterization speeds-up inference using natural gradient descent, and provides a tighter evidence lower bound for hyperparameter learning. The approach has the same memory cost as the current SVGP methods, but it is faster and…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Microsoft Research New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；New York University（纽约大学）
We introduce a new scalable variational Gaussian process approximation which provides a high fidelity approximation while retaining general applicability. We propose the harmonic kernel decomposition (HKD), which uses Fourier series to decompose a kernel as a sum of orthogonal kernels. Our variational approximation exploits this orthogonality to enable a large number of inducing points at a low computational cost. We demonstrate that, on a range of regression and classification problems, our approach can exploit input space symmetries such as translations and reflections, and it significantly …
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；RIKEN Center for AI Project（理化学研究所人工智能项目中心）
Gaussian process (GP) regression with 1D inputs can often be performed in linear time via a stochastic differential equation formulation. However, for non-Gaussian likelihoods, this requires application of approximate inference methods which can make the implementation difficult, e.g., expectation propagation can be numerically unstable and variational inference can be computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a new method that removes such difficulties. Building upon an existing method called conjugate-computation variational inference, our approach enables linear-time inference …
New York University（纽约大学）；Facebook Inc.（脸书公司）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Through sequential construction of posteriors on observing data online, Bayes' theorem provides a natural framework for continual learning. We develop Variational Auto-Regressive Gaussian Processes (VAR-GPs), a principled posterior updating mechanism to solve sequential tasks in continual learning. By relying on sparse inducing point approximations for scalable posteriors, we propose a novel auto-regressive variational distribution which reveals two fruitful connections to existing results in Bayesian inference, expectation propagation and orthogonal inducing points. Mean predictive entropy es…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
Conventional variational autoencoders fail in modeling correlations between data points due to their use of factorized priors. Amortized Gaussian process inference through GP-VAEs has led to significant improvements in this regard, but is still inhibited by the intrinsic complexity of exact GP inference. We improve the scalability of these methods through principled sparse inference approaches. We propose a new scalable GP-VAE model that outperforms existing approaches in terms of runtime and memory footprint, is easy to implement, and allows for joint end-to-end optimization of all components…
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit（盖茨比计算神经科学单元）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Sparse variational approximations allow for principled and scalable inference in Gaussian Process (GP) models. In settings where several GPs are part of the generative model, theses GPs are a posteriori coupled. For many applications such as regression where predictive accuracy is the quantity of interest, this coupling is not crucial. Howewer if one is interested in posterior uncertainty, it cannot be ignored. A key element of variational inference schemes is the choice of the approximate posterior parameterization. When the number of latent variables is large, mean field (MF) methods provide…
Amortized Structured Stochastic Variational Inference for Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models
LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN)（纽伦堡工业大学）；Helmholtz AI（亥姆霍兹人工智能中心）；Xyme
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；RIKEN Center for AI Project（理化学研究所人工智能项目中心）
Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) are multi-layer, flexible extensions of Gaussian processes but their training remains challenging. Sparse approximations simplify the training but often require optimization over a large number of inducing inputs and their locations across layers. In this paper, we simplify the training by setting the locations to a fixed subset of data and sampling the inducing inputs from a variational distribution. This reduces the trainable parameters and computation cost without significant performance degradations, as demonstrated by our empirical results on regression prob…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
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 variational Bayesian SGPR (VBSGPR) models jointly treat both the distributions of the inducing variables and hyperparameters as variational parameters, which enables the decomposability of the variational lower bound that in turn can be exploited for stochastic optimization. Such…
We utilize copulas to constitute a unified framework for constructing and optimizing variational proposals in hierarchical Bayesian models. For models with continuous and non-Gaussian hidden variables, we propose a semiparametric and automated variational Gaussian copula approach, in which the parametric Gaussian copula family is able to preserve multivariate posterior dependence, and the nonparametric transformations based on Bernstein polynomials provide ample flexibility in characterizing the univariate marginal posteriors.
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）
Recent machine learning advances have proposed black-box estimation of unknown continuous-time system dynamics directly from data. However, earlier works are based on approximative ODE solutions or point estimates. We propose a novel Bayesian nonparametric model that uses Gaussian processes to infer posteriors of unknown ODE systems directly from data. We derive sparse variational inference with decoupled functional sampling to represent vector field posteriors. We also introduce a probabilistic shooting augmentation to enable efficient inference from arbitrarily long trajectories. The method …
Bayesian methods have become a popular way to incorporate prior knowledge and a notion of uncertainty into machine learning models. At the same time, the complexity of modern machine learning makes it challenging to comprehend a model's reasoning process, let alone express specific prior assumptions in a rigorous manner. While primarily interested in the former issue, recent developments intransparent machine learning could also broaden the range of prior information that we can provide to complex Bayesian models. Inspired by the idea of self-explaining models, we introduce a corresponding con…
University of Utah（犹他大学）；School of Computing（计算学院）；Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute（科学计算与成像研究所）
Gaussian process regression networks (GPRN) are powerful Bayesian models for multi-output regression, but their inference is intractable. To address this issue, existing methods use a fully factorized structure (or a mixture of such structures) over all the outputs and latent functions for posterior approximation, which, however, can miss the strong posterior dependencies among the latent variables and hurt the inference quality. In addition, the updates of the variational parameters are inefficient and can be prohibitively expensive for a large number of outputs. To overcome these limitations…
Sparse, knot-based Gaussian processes have enjoyed considerable success as scalable approximations to full Gaussian processes. Certain sparse models can be derived through specific variational approximations to the true posterior, and knots can be selected to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the approximate and true posterior. While this has been a successful approach, simultaneous optimization of knots can be slow due to the number of parameters being optimized. Furthermore, there have been few proposed methods for selecting the number of knots, and no experimental results exi…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a powerful framework for extrapolation, interpolation, and noise removal in regression and classification. This paper considers constraining GPs to arbitrarily-shaped domains with boundary conditions. We solve a Fourier-like generalised harmonic feature representation of the GP prior in the domain of interest, which both constrains the GP and attains a low-rank representation that is used for speeding up inference. The method scales as $\mathcal{O}(nm^2)$ in prediction and $\mathcal{O}(m^3)$ in hyperparameter learning for regression, where $n$ is the number of …
Complex multivariate time series arise in many fields, ranging from computer vision to robotics or medicine. Often we are interested in the independent underlying factors that give rise to the high-dimensional data we are observing. While many models have been introduced to learn such disentangled representations, only few attempt to explicitly exploit the structure of sequential data. We investigate the disentanglement properties of Gaussian process variational autoencoders, a class of models recently introduced that have been successful in different tasks on time series data. Our model explo…
Gaussian process classification is a popular method with a number of appealing properties. We show how to scale the model within a variational inducing point framework, outperforming the state of the art on benchmark datasets. Importantly, the variational formulation can be exploited to allow classification in problems with millions of data points, as we demonstrate in experiments.
Variational autoencoders often assume isotropic Gaussian priors and mean-field posteriors, hence do not exploit structure in scenarios where we may expect similarity or consistency across latent variables. Gaussian process variational autoencoders alleviate this problem through the use of a latent Gaussian process, but lead to a cubic inference time complexity. We propose a more scalable extension of these models by leveraging the independence of the auxiliary features, which is present in many datasets. Our model factorizes the latent kernel across these features in different dimensions, lead…
We develop a framework for generalized variational inference in infinite-dimensional function spaces and use it to construct a method termed Gaussian Wasserstein inference (GWI). GWI leverages the Wasserstein distance between Gaussian measures on the Hilbert space of square-integrable functions in order to determine a variational posterior using a tractable optimisation criterion and avoids pathologies arising in standard variational function space inference. An exciting application of GWI is the ability to use deep neural networks in the variational parametrisation of GWI, combining their sup…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Variational Gaussian process (GP) approximations have become a standard tool in fast GP inference. This technique requires a user to select variational features to increase efficiency. So far the common choices in the literature are disparate and lacking generality. We propose to view the GP as lying in a Banach space which then facilitates a unified perspective. This is used to understand the relationship between existing features and to draw a connection between kernel ridge regression and variational GP approximations.
Deep Gaussian processes provide a flexible approach to probabilistic modelling of data using either supervised or unsupervised learning. For tractable inference approximations to the marginal likelihood of the model must be made. The original approach to approximate inference in these models used variational compression to allow for approximate variational marginalization of the hidden variables leading to a lower bound on the marginal likelihood of the model [Damianou and Lawrence, 2013]. In this paper we extend this idea with a nested variational compression. The resulting lower bound on the…
Modeling sequential data has become more and more important in practice. Some applications are autonomous driving, virtual sensors and weather forecasting. To model such systems so called recurrent models are used. In this article we introduce two new Deep Recurrent Gaussian Process (DRGP) models based on the Sparse Spectrum Gaussian Process (SSGP) and the improved variational version called Variational Sparse Spectrum Gaussian Process (VSSGP). We follow the recurrent structure given by an existing DRGP based on a specific sparse Nyström approximation. Therefore, we also variationally integrat…
