Research map / Probabilistic and scientific modeling / Variational and generative sampling
An Instability in Variational Inference for Topic Models
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Measured effects reported in the paper
| What was changed | Where | Measured | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use naive mean field instead of the information-theoretically uninformative posterior | LDA · LDA synthetic, β between β_inst and β_Bayes | topic/weight correlation with ground truth | Mixed |
| Use naive mean field instead of TAP | LDA · LDA synthetic, β between β_inst and β_Bayes | distance from the uninformative fixed point | Hurt |
| Replace the nominally 0.9 credible interval with naive mean-field intervals at β=2 | LDA synthetic, n=d=5000 · LDA synthetic, β=2 | coverage: 0.9 -> 0.87 | Hurt |
| Replace the nominally 0.9 credible interval with naive mean-field intervals at β=4.1 | LDA synthetic, n=d=5000 · LDA synthetic, β=4.1 | coverage: 0.9 -> 0.65 | Hurt |
| Replace the nominally 0.9 credible interval with naive mean-field intervals at β=6 | LDA synthetic, n=d=5000 · LDA synthetic, β=6 | coverage: 0.9 -> 0.51 | Hurt |
| Use TAP free energy and its AMP iteration instead of naive mean-field free energy | LDA · LDA synthetic, β between β_inst and β_spect | distance from the uninformative fixed point | Helped |
| Include the TAP correction to the naive mean-field free energy | Z₂-synchronization · Z₂-synchronization, λ<1 | local-minimum stability of the uninformative point: 1-2λ -> (1-λ)^2 | Helped |
Closest papers by meaning
- A Discrete Variational Recurrent Topic Model without the Reparametrization Trick (NeurIPS 2020 · similarity 0.90)
- Autoencoding Variational Inference For Topic Models (ICLR 2017 · similarity 0.89)
- Provable Algorithms for Inference in Topic Models (ICML 2016 · similarity 0.89)
- Discovering Discrete Latent Topics with Neural Variational Inference (ICML 2017 · similarity 0.87)
- TreeVI: Reparameterizable Tree-structured Variational Inference for Instance-level Correlation Capturing (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.85)
- Latent Thought Models with Variational Bayes Inference-Time Computation (ICML 2025 · similarity 0.84)
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