In high-dimensions, the prior tails can have a significant effect on both posterior computation and asymptotic concentration rates. To achieve optimal rates while keeping the posterior computations relatively simple, an empirical Bayes approach has recently been proposed, featuring thin-tailed conjugate priors with data-driven centers. While conjugate priors ease some of the computational burden, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are still needed, which can be expensive when dimension is high. In this paper, we develop a variational approximation to the empirical Bayes posterior that is fast to compute and retains the optimal concentration rate properties of the original. In simulations, our method is shown to have superior performance compared to existing variational approximations in the literature across a wide range of high-dimensional settings.
Ising models originated in statistical physics and are widely used in modeling spatial data and computer vision problems. However, statistical inference of this model remains challenging due to intractable nature of the normalizing constant in the likelihood. Here, we use a pseudo-likelihood instead to study the Bayesian estimation of two-parameter, inverse temperature, and magnetization, Ising model with a fully specified coupling matrix. We develop a computationally efficient variational Bayes procedure for model estimation. Under the Gaussian mean-field variational family, we derive posteri…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of post-hoc accuracy measures that are both theoretically justified and computationally efficient. In this paper, we provide rigorous bounds on the error of posterior mean and uncertainty estimates that arise from full-distribution approximations, as in variational inference. Our bounds are widely applicable, as they require only that the approximating and exact pos…
Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and usefulness of BNN, the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo based implementation suffers from high computational cost, limiting the use of this powerful technique in large scale studies. The variational Bayes inference has become a viable alternative to circumvent some of the computational issues. Although the approach is popular in machine learning, its applicati…
Konstanz University of Applied Sciences（康斯坦茨应用科学大学）；Zurich University of Applied Sciences（苏黎世应用科学大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural networks, variational inference is widely used to approximate difficult-to-compute posteriors by variational distributions. Usually, Gaussians are used as variational distributions (Gaussian-VI) which limits the quality of the approximation due to their limited flexibility. Transformation models on the other hand are flexible enough to fit any distribution. Here w…
Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies gGmbH（海德堡理论研究所）
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies. Variational approaches avoid this issue by explicitly minimising the Kullback-Leibler divergence DKL between a postulated posterior and the true (unnormalised) logarithmic posterior. However, they rely on a closed form DKL in order to update the variational parameters. To address this, stochastic versions of variational inference have been devised that approximat…
The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference, focusing on mean-field or other simple structured approximations. This restriction has a significant impact on the quality of inferences made using variational methods. We introduce a new approach for specifying flexible, arbitrarily complex and scalable approximate posterior distributions. Our approximations are distributions constructed through a normalizi…
Variational inference methods often focus on the problem of efficient model optimization, with little emphasis on the choice of the approximating posterior. In this paper, we review and implement the various methods that enable us to develop a rich family of approximating posteriors. We show that one particular method employing transformations on distributions results in developing very rich and complex posterior approximation. We analyze its performance on the MNIST dataset by implementing with a Variational Autoencoder and demonstrate its effectiveness in learning better posterior distributi…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Mount Holyoke College（曼荷莲学院）
Recent work in variational inference (VI) uses ideas from Monte Carlo estimation to tighten the lower bounds on the log-likelihood that are used as objectives. However, there is no systematic understanding of how optimizing different objectives relates to approximating the posterior distribution. Developing such a connection is important if the ideas are to be applied to inference-i.e., applications that require an approximate posterior and not just an approximation of the log-likelihood. Given a VI objective defined by a Monte Carlo estimator of the likelihood, we use a "divide and couple" pr…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior …
Mean-field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is an approximate Bayesian posterior inference technique that is increasingly popular due to its fast runtimes on large-scale datasets. However, even when MFVB provides accurate posterior means for certain parameters, it often mis-estimates variances and covariances. Furthermore, prior robustness measures have remained undeveloped for MFVB. By deriving a simple formula for the effect of infinitesimal model perturbations on MFVB posterior means, we provide both improved covariance estimates and local robustness measures for MFVB, thus greatly expanding the pr…
The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such challenges culminate to lack of convergence to the parameter posterior. Nevertheless, this paper shows that a non-converged Markov chain, generated via MCMC sampling from the parameter space of a neural network, can yield via Bayesian marginalization a valuable posterior predictive distribution of the output of the neural network. Classification examples based on mul…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of distributions. For practical reasons, the family of distributions in VI is usually constrained so that it does not include the exact posterior, even as a limit point. Thus, no matter how long VI is run, the resulting approximation will not approach the exact posterior. We propose to instead consider a more flexible approximating family consisting of all possib…
Broad College of Business, Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学布罗德商学院）；the University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校麦库姆斯商学院）
Leveraging well-established MCMC strategies, we propose MCMC-interactive variational inference (MIVI) to not only estimate the posterior in a time constrained manner, but also facilitate the design of MCMC transitions. Constructing a variational distribution followed by a short Markov chain that has parameters to learn, MIVI takes advantage of the complementary properties of variational inference and MCMC to encourage mutual improvement. On one hand, with the variational distribution locating high posterior density regions, the Markov chain is optimized within the variational inference framewo…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；HHMI Janelia Research Campus（HHMI珍妮亚研究园区）
Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully exploits GPU parallelism. However, such simple approximate posteriors are often insufficient, as they eliminate statistical dependencies in the posterior. While it is possible to use normalizing flow approximate posteriors for continuous latents, some problems have discrete latents and strong statistical dependencies. The most natural approach to model these depe…
We propose a simple and general variant of the standard reparameterized gradient estimator for the variational evidence lower bound. Specifically, we remove a part of the total derivative with respect to the variational parameters that corresponds to the score function. Removing this term produces an unbiased gradient estimator whose variance approaches zero as the approximate posterior approaches the exact posterior. We analyze the behavior of this gradient estimator theoretically and empirically, and generalize it to more complex variational distributions such as mixtures and importance-weig…
The posterior over Bayesian neural network (BNN) parameters is extremely high-dimensional and non-convex. For computational reasons, researchers approximate this posterior using inexpensive mini-batch methods such as mean-field variational inference or stochastic-gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC). To investigate foundational questions in Bayesian deep learning, we instead use full-batch Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) on modern architectures. We show that (1) BNNs can achieve significant performance gains over standard training and deep ensembles; (2) a single long HMC chain can provide…
Fast and Robust Likelihood-Guided Diffusion Posterior Sampling with Amortized Variational Inference
Institute of Foundation Models, MBZUAI（基础模型研究所，MBZUAI）；Huawei Lagrange Mathematics and Computing Research Center, Paris, France（华为拉格朗日数学与计算研究中心，法国巴黎）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of AI, Chair of the ML Department, EPITA, Laboratoire Recherche de l'EPITA（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学，机器学习系主任，EPITA，EPITA研究实验室）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational posterior. However, existing methods on implicit posteriors still face challenges of noisy estimation and computational infeasibility when applied to models with high-dimensional latent variables. In this paper, we present a new approach named Kernel Implicit Variational Inference that addresses these challenges. As far as we know, for the first time implicit va…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good parameter estimates and predicted values when a rich classes of approximating distributions are considered. In this paper we propose Updating VB (UVB), a recursive algorithm used to update a sequence of VB posterior approximations in an online setting, with the computation of each posterior update requiring only the data observed since the previous update. An exte…
Although Bayesian inference is an immensely popular paradigm among a large segment of scientists including statisticians, most applications consider objective priors and need critical investigations (Efron, 2013, Science). While it has several optimal properties, a major drawback of Bayesian inference is the lack of robustness against data contamination and model misspecification, which becomes pernicious in the use of objective priors. This paper presents the general formulation of a Bayes pseudo-posterior distribution yielding robust inference. Exponential convergence results related to the …
We propose a new empirical Bayes approach for inference in the $p \gg n$ normal linear model. The novelty is the use of data in the prior in two ways, for centering and regularization. Under suitable sparsity assumptions, we establish a variety of concentration rate results for the empirical Bayes posterior distribution, relevant for both estimation and model selection. Computation is straightforward and fast, and simulation results demonstrate the strong finite-sample performance of the empirical Bayes model selection procedure.
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
We propose a black-box variational inference method to approximate intractable distributions with an increasingly rich approximating class. Our method, termed variational boosting, iteratively refines an existing variational approximation by solving a sequence of optimization problems, allowing the practitioner to trade computation time for accuracy. We show how to expand the variational approximating class by incorporating additional covariance structure and by introducing new components to form a mixture. We apply variational boosting to synthetic and real statistical models, and show that r…
This paper aims at developing a quasi-Bayesian analysis of the nonparametric instrumental variables model, with a focus on the asymptotic properties of quasi-posterior distributions. In this paper, instead of assuming a distributional assumption on the data generating process, we consider a quasi-likelihood induced from the conditional moment restriction, and put priors on the function-valued parameter. We call the resulting posterior quasi-posterior, which corresponds to ``Gibbs posterior'' in the literature. Here we focus on priors constructed on slowly growing finite-dimensional sieves. We …
Predictive variational inference: Learn the predictively optimal posterior distribution
College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校信息与计算机科学学院）；Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校统计与数据科学系）
When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior uncertainty. And, even if the most important modes can be found, it is difficult to evaluate their relative weights in the posterior. Here we propose an approach using parallel runs of MCMC, variational, or mode-based inference to hit as many modes or separated regions as possible and then combine these using Bayesian stacking, a scalable method for constructing a we…
Selecting a subset of variables for linear models remains an active area of research. This paper reviews many of the recent contributions to the Bayesian model selection and shrinkage prior literature. A posterior variable selection summary is proposed, which distills a full posterior distribution over regression coefficients into a sequence of sparse linear predictors.
Many modern experiments, such as microarray gene expression and genome-wide association studies, present the problem of estimating a large number of parallel effects. Bayesian inference is a popular approach for analyzing such data by modeling the large number of unknown parameters as random effects from a common prior distribution. However, misspecification of the prior distribution can lead to erroneous estimates of the random effects, especially for the largest and most interesting effects. This paper has two aims. First, we propose a robustified posterior distribution for a parametric Baye…
Complex simulators have become a ubiquitous tool in many scientific disciplines, providing high-fidelity, implicit probabilistic models of natural and social phenomena. Unfortunately, they typically lack the tractability required for conventional statistical analysis. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has emerged as a key method in simulation-based inference, wherein the true model likelihood and posterior are approximated using samples from the simulator. In this paper, we draw connections between ABC and generalized Bayesian inference (GBI). First, we re-interpret the accept/reject step…
Although linear regression models are fundamental tools in statistical science, the estimation results can be sensitive to outliers. While several robust methods have been proposed in frequentist frameworks, statistical inference is not necessarily straightforward. We here propose a Bayesian approach to robust inference on linear regression models using synthetic posterior distributions based on $γ$-divergence, which enables us to naturally assess the uncertainty of the estimation through the posterior distribution. We also consider the use of shrinkage priors for the regression coefficients t…
Existing Bayesian models, especially nonparametric Bayesian methods, rely on specially conceived priors to incorporate domain knowledge for discovering improved latent representations. While priors can affect posterior distributions through Bayes' rule, imposing posterior regularization is arguably more direct and in some cases more natural and general. In this paper, we present regularized Bayesian inference (RegBayes), a novel computational framework that performs posterior inference with a regularization term on the desired post-data posterior distribution under an information theoretical f…
Hypothesis testing is an essential statistical method in psychology and the cognitive sciences. The problems of traditional null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) have been discussed widely, and among the proposed solutions to the replication problems caused by the inappropriate use of significance tests and $p$-values is a shift towards Bayesian data analysis. However, Bayesian hypothesis testing is concerned with various posterior indices for significance and the size of an effect. This complicates Bayesian hypothesis testing in practice, as the availability of multiple Bayesian alterna…
Let $X$ have a Generalized Poisson distribution with mean $kb$, where $b$ is a known constant in the unit interval and $k$ is a discrete, non-negative parameter. We show that if an uninformative uniform prior for $k$ is assumed, then the posterior distribution of $k$ can be approximated using the gamma distribution when $b$ is small.
A new approach for Bayesian model averaging (BMA) and selection is proposed, based on the mixture model approach for hypothesis testing in Kaniav et al., 2014. Inheriting from the good properties of this approach, it extends BMA to cases where improper priors are chosen for parameters that are common to all candidate models. From an algorithmic point of view, our approach consists in sampling from the posterior distribution of the single-datum mixture of all candidate models, weighted by their prior probabilities. We show that this posterior distribution is equal to the 'Bayesian-model average…
A new method for the computation of the posterior distribution of the number k of components in a finite mixture is presented. Two aspects of prior specification are also studied: an argument is made for the use of a Poisson(1) distribution as the prior for k; and methods are given for the selection of hyperparameter values in the mixture of normals model, with natural conjugate priors on the components parameters.
Bayes factor, defined as the ratio of the marginal likelihood functions of two competing models, is the natural Bayesian procedure for model selection. Marginal likelihoods are usually computationally demanding and complex. This scenario is particularly cumbersome in linear mixed models (LMMs) because marginal likelihood functions involve integrals of large dimensions determined by the number of parameters and the number of random effects, which in turn increase with the number of individuals in the sample. The power posterior is an attractive proposal in the context of the Markov chain Monte …
