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Main Authors: Wang, Zheng, Bouguila, Nizar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18795
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author Wang, Zheng
Bouguila, Nizar
author_facet Wang, Zheng
Bouguila, Nizar
contents Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a foundational model for discovering latent thematic structure in discrete data, but its Dirichlet prior cannot represent the rich correlations and hierarchical relationships often present among topics. We introduce the framework of Latent Dirichlet-Tree Allocation (LDTA), a generalization of LDA that replaces the Dirichlet prior with an arbitrary Dirichlet-Tree (DT) distribution. LDTA preserves LDA's generative structure but enables expressive, tree-structured priors over topic proportions. To perform inference, we develop universal mean-field variational inference and Expectation Propagation, providing tractable updates for all DT. We reveal the vectorized nature of the two inference methods through theoretical development, and perform fully vectorized, GPU-accelerated implementations. The resulting framework substantially expands the modeling capacity of LDA while maintaining scalability and computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vectorized Bayesian Inference for Latent Dirichlet-Tree Allocation
Wang, Zheng
Bouguila, Nizar
Machine Learning
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a foundational model for discovering latent thematic structure in discrete data, but its Dirichlet prior cannot represent the rich correlations and hierarchical relationships often present among topics. We introduce the framework of Latent Dirichlet-Tree Allocation (LDTA), a generalization of LDA that replaces the Dirichlet prior with an arbitrary Dirichlet-Tree (DT) distribution. LDTA preserves LDA's generative structure but enables expressive, tree-structured priors over topic proportions. To perform inference, we develop universal mean-field variational inference and Expectation Propagation, providing tractable updates for all DT. We reveal the vectorized nature of the two inference methods through theoretical development, and perform fully vectorized, GPU-accelerated implementations. The resulting framework substantially expands the modeling capacity of LDA while maintaining scalability and computational efficiency.
title Vectorized Bayesian Inference for Latent Dirichlet-Tree Allocation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18795