Conjugate-Computation Variational Inference : Converting Variational Inference in Non-Conjugate Models to Inferences in Conjugate Models
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Variational inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with non-conjugate terms. On the other hand, stochastic-gradient methods can handle the non-conjugate terms but they usually ignore the conjugate structure of the model which might result in slow convergence. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called Conjugate-computation Variational Inference (CVI) which brings the best of the two worlds together -- it uses conjugate computations for the conjugate terms and employs stochastic gradients for the rest. We derive this algorithm by using a stochastic mirror-descent method in the mean-parameter space, and then expressing each gradient step as a variational inference in a conjugate model. We demonstrate our algorithm's applicability to a large class of models and establish its convergence. Our experimental results show that our method converges much faster than the methods that ignore the conjugate structure of the model.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it