Variational Inference & ELBO Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Key papers on variational inference, from mean-field and stochastic variants to modern tighter bounds and amortized inference.

Variational Inference & ELBO: 10 key papers

1. Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians
   Blei et al. arXiv 2016.
2. Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes
   Kingma and Welling. arXiv 2013.
3. Stochastic Variational Inference
   Hoffman et al. arXiv 2012.
4. Black Box Variational Inference
   Ranganath et al. arXiv 2013.
5. Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference
   Kucukelbir et al. arXiv 2016.
6. Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows
   Rezende and Mohamed. arXiv 2015.
7. Importance Weighted Autoencoders
   Burda et al. arXiv 2015.
8. Advances in Variational Inference
   Zhang et al. arXiv 2017.
9. Yes, but Did It Work?: Evaluating Variational Inference
   Yao et al. arXiv 2018.
10. Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax
    Jang et al. arXiv 2016.

Related reading lists

• Gaussian Processes
• Generative Modeling
• Information Theory & RL
• Bayesian Deep Learning
• Flow Matching & Schrödinger Bridges
• Mean-Field Games & Mean-Field Control
• Zero-Shot RL & Generalization
• Representation Learning for RL