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Poster
Functional Variational Inference based on Stochastic Process Generators
Chao Ma · José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Thu Dec 09 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @
in Poster Session 6 »

Bayesian inference in the space of functions has been an important topic for Bayesian modeling in the past. In this paper, we propose a new solution to this problem called Functional Variational Inference (FVI). In FVI, we minimize a divergence in function space between the variational distribution and the posterior process. This is done by using as functional variational family a new class of flexible distributions called Stochastic Process Generators (SPGs), which are cleverly designed so that the functional ELBO can be estimated efficiently using analytic solutions and mini-batch sampling. FVI can be applied to stochastic process priors when random function samples from those priors are available. Our experiments show that FVI consistently outperforms weight-space and function space VI methods on several tasks, which validates the effectiveness of our approach.

Keywords: Deep Learning · Generative Model

Author Information

Chao Ma (University of Cambridge)
José Miguel Hernández-Lobato (University of Cambridge)

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