Papers › Variational inference for cutting feedback in misspecified models
Variational inference for cutting feedback in misspecified models
Xuejun Yu, David J. Nott, Michael Stanley Smith
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify posterior inference. This is called "cutting feedback", and both the specification and computation of the posterior for such "cut models" is challenging. In this paper, we define cut posterior distributions as solutions to constrained optimization problems, and propose optimization-based variational methods for their computation. These methods are faster than existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approaches for computing cut posterior distributions by an order of magnitude. It is also shown that variational methods allow for the evaluation of computationally intensive conflict checks that can be used to decide whether or not feedback should be cut. Our methods are illustrated in a number of simulated and real examples, including an application where recent methodological advances that combine variational inference and MCMC within the variational optimization are used.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections