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Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the posterior leading to miscalibration and potential degeneracy. Importance sampling (IS), on the other hand, is often used to fine-tune and de-bias the estimates of approximate Bayesian inference procedures. The quality of IS crucially depends on the choice of the proposal distribution. Ideally, the proposal distribution has heavier tails than the target, which is rarely achievable by minimizing the RKL. We thus propose a novel combination of optimization and sampling techniques for approximate Bayesian inference by constructing an IS proposal distribution through the minimization of a forward KL (FKL) divergence. This approach guarantees asymptotic consistency and a fast convergence towards both the optimal IS estimator and the optimal variational approximation. We empirically demonstrate on real data that our method is competitive with variational boosting and MCMC.
The variational framework for learning inducing variables (Titsias, 2009a) has had a large impact on the Gaussian process literature. The framework may be interpreted as minimizing a rigorously defined Kullback-Leibler divergence between the approxim
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo, but th
This paper addresses a new interpretation of reinforcement learning (RL) as reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence optimization, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL divergence. Although RL originally aims to maximize return indir
Renyi divergence is related to Renyi entropy much like Kullback-Leibler divergence is related to Shannons entropy, and comes up in many settings. It was introduced by Renyi as a measure of information that satisfies almost the same axioms as Kullback
We propose a method to fuse posterior distributions learned from heterogeneous datasets. Our algorithm relies on a mean field assumption for both the fused model and the individual dataset posteriors and proceeds using a simple assign-and-average app