Stability of Sequential and Parallel Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference
序贯与并行坐标上升变分推断的稳定性
We highlight a striking difference in behavior between two widely used variants of coordinate ascent variational inference: the sequential and parallel algorithms. While such differences were known in the numerical analysis literature in simpler settings, they remain largely unexplored in the optimization-focused literature on variational inference in more complex models. Focusing on the moderately high-dimensional linear regression problem, we show that the sequential…