← Search

Sharad Vikram

7 accepted papers

2023

Training Chain-of-Thought via Latent-Variable Inference

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large language models (LLMs) solve problems more accurately and interpretably when instructed to work out the answer step by step using a "chain-of-thought" (CoT) prompt. One can also improve LLMs' performance on a specific task by supervised fine-tuning, i.e., by using gradient ascent on some tunab…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2021

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference with Mixtures

AISTATS 2021poster

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is a useful tool for efficiently learning probabilistic models in machine learning. Generally approximate posteriors learned by ADVI are forced to be unimodal in order to facilitate use of the reparameterization trick. In this paper, we show how…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2021

Automatic structured variational inference

AISTATS 2021poster

Stochastic variational inference offers an attractive option as a default method for differentiable probabilistic programming. However, the performance of the variational approach depends on the choice of an appropriate variational family. Here, we introduce automatic structured variational inferenc…

2021

What Are Bayesian Neural Network Posteriors Really Like?

ICML 2021oral

The posterior over Bayesian neural network (BNN) parameters is extremely high-dimensional and non-convex. For computational reasons, researchers approximate this posterior using inexpensive mini-batch methods such as mean-field variational inference or stochastic-gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (S…

2019

SOLAR: Deep Structured Representations for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2019oral

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a data efficient approach for learning control tasks but is difficult to utilize in domains with complex observations such as images. In this paper, we present a method for learning representations that are suitable for iterative model-based p…

2019

The LORACs Prior for VAEs: Letting the Trees Speak for the Data

AISTATS 2019poster

In variational autoencoders, the prior on the latent codes $z$ is often treated as an afterthought, but the prior shapes the kind of latent representation that the model learns. If the goal is to learn a representation that is interpretable and useful, then the prior should reflect the ways in which…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar