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Poster
On Contrastive Learning for Likelihood-free Inference
Conor Durkan · Iain Murray · George Papamakarios

Tue Jul 14 12:00 PM -- 12:45 PM & Wed Jul 15 01:00 AM -- 01:45 AM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 6 »

Likelihood-free methods perform parameter inference in stochastic simulator models where evaluating the likelihood is intractable but sampling synthetic data is possible. One class of methods for this likelihood-free problem uses a classifier to distinguish between pairs of parameter-observation samples generated using the simulator and pairs sampled from some reference distribution, which implicitly learns a density ratio proportional to the likelihood. Another popular class of methods fits a conditional distribution to the parameter posterior directly, and a particular recent variant allows for the use of flexible neural density estimators for this task. In this work, we show that both of these approaches can be unified under a general contrastive learning scheme, and clarify how they should be run and compared.

Keywords: Approximate Inference · Bayesian Deep Learning · Bayesian Methods · Deep Generative Models · Probabilistic Inference - Approximate, Monte Carlo, and Spectral Methods

Author Information

Conor Durkan (University of Edinburgh)
Iain Murray (University of Edinburgh)

Iain Murray is a SICSA Lecturer in Machine Learning at the University of Edinburgh. Iain was introduced to machine learning by David MacKay and Zoubin Ghahramani, both previous NIPS tutorial speakers. He obtained his PhD in 2007 from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. His thesis on Monte Carlo methods received an honourable mention for the ISBA Savage Award. He was a commonwealth fellow in Machine Learning at the University of Toronto, before moving to Edinburgh in 2010. Iain's research interests include building flexible probabilistic models of data, and probabilistic inference from indirect and uncertain observations. Iain is passionate about teaching. He has lectured at several Summer schools, is listed in the top 15 authors on videolectures.net, and was awarded the EUSA Van Heyningen Award for Teaching in Science and Engineering in 2015.

George Papamakarios (DeepMind)

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