Amortized Variational Inference for Simple Hierarchical ModelsDownload PDF

Published: 09 Nov 2021, Last Modified: 22 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Variational Inference, Black Box Variational Inference, Amortized Variational Inference, Scalable Variational Inference, Hierarchical Models, Structured Variational Inference, Gaussian VI
Abstract: It is difficult to use subsampling with variational inference in hierarchical models since the number of local latent variables scales with the dataset. Thus, inference in hierarchical models remains a challenge at a large scale. It is helpful to use a variational family with a structure matching the posterior, but optimization is still slow due to the huge number of local distributions. Instead, this paper suggests an amortized approach where shared parameters simultaneously represent all local distributions. This approach is similarly accurate as using a given joint distribution (e.g., a full-rank Gaussian) but is feasible on datasets that are several orders of magnitude larger. It is also dramatically faster than using a structured variational distribution.
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