Amortized Factor Inference Networks for Posterior Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ko, Joohwan, Domke, Justin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Ko, Joohwan
Domke, Justin
author_facet Ko, Joohwan
Domke, Justin
contents Amortized inference promises fast test-time Bayesian inference, but existing methods are inherently tied to fixed models. Extending amortization to unseen models typically requires retraining or costly test-time finetuning. In this paper, we ask: is it possible to build a single inference network capable of generalizing across varying priors, likelihoods, and dimensionality? We introduce Amortized Factor Inference Networks (AFINs), a family of encode-merge-decode inference networks built on dimension-independent modules that map a model specification and its observations to the parameters of a variational posterior. Experimentally, a single trained AFIN achieves posterior accuracy comparable to NUTS and several variational inference methods, while requiring 2 to 4 orders of magnitude less test-time compute. Code is available at https://github.com/joohwanko/AFINs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_26419
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Amortized Factor Inference Networks for Posterior Inference
Ko, Joohwan
Domke, Justin
Machine Learning
Amortized inference promises fast test-time Bayesian inference, but existing methods are inherently tied to fixed models. Extending amortization to unseen models typically requires retraining or costly test-time finetuning. In this paper, we ask: is it possible to build a single inference network capable of generalizing across varying priors, likelihoods, and dimensionality? We introduce Amortized Factor Inference Networks (AFINs), a family of encode-merge-decode inference networks built on dimension-independent modules that map a model specification and its observations to the parameters of a variational posterior. Experimentally, a single trained AFIN achieves posterior accuracy comparable to NUTS and several variational inference methods, while requiring 2 to 4 orders of magnitude less test-time compute. Code is available at https://github.com/joohwanko/AFINs.
title Amortized Factor Inference Networks for Posterior Inference
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26419