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Advances in Variational Inference

3 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

3 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a high-dimensional Bayesian posterior with a simpler variational distribution by solving an optimization problem. This approach has been successfully used in various models and large-scale applications. In this review, we give an overview of recent trends in variational inference. We first introduce standard mean field variational inference, then review recent advances focusing on the following aspects: (a) scalable VI, which includes stochastic approximations, (b) generic VI, which extends the applicability of VI to a large class of otherwise intractable models, such as non-conjugate models, (c) accurate VI, which includes variational models beyond the mean field approximation or with atypical divergences, and (d) amortized VI, which implements the inference over local latent variables with inference networks. Finally, we provide a summary of promising future research directions.

fields

cs.CL 2 cs.LG 1

years

2022 1 2021 2

representative citing papers

Scaling Laws for Transfer

cs.LG · 2021-02-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

citing papers explorer

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

  • Scaling Laws for Transfer cs.LG · 2021-02-02 · unverdicted · none · ref 130 · internal anchor

    Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.

  • Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · none · ref 249

    Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

  • A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment cs.CL · 2021-12-01 · conditional · none · ref 172

    Ranked preference modeling outperforms imitation learning for language model alignment and scales more favorably with model size.