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Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-10-23 Benjamin Jourdain , Jérôme Lelong

Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) is a recently proposed variation of Monte Carlo (MC) simulation that achieves variance reduction by simulating the governing equations on a series of spatial (or temporal) grids with increasing resolution.…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-26 Hillary Fairbanks , Alireza Doostan , Christian Ketelsen , Gianluca Iaccarino

We propose neural control variates (NCV) for unbiased variance reduction in parametric Monte Carlo integration. So far, the core challenge of applying the method of control variates has been finding a good approximation of the integrand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-07 Thomas Müller , Fabrice Rousselle , Jan Novák , Alexander Keller

A simple and stable method for computing accurate expectation values of observable with Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) or Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) algorithms is presented. The basic idea consists in replacing the usual ``bare'' estimator…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2009-11-10 Roland Assaraf , Michel Caffarel

In this paper, we extend a recently introduced multi-fidelity control variate for the uncertainty quantification of the Boltzmann equation to the case of kinetic models arising in the study of multiagent systems. For these phenomena, where…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-02-05 Lorenzo Pareschi , Torsten Trimborn , Mattia Zanella

Monte Carlo methods are widely used for neutron transport simulations at least partly because of the accuracy they bring to the modeling of these problems. However, the computational burden associated with the slow convergence rate of Monte…

Computational Physics · Physics 2025-09-30 Jordan Northrop , Ilham Variansyah , Todd Palmer , Camille Palmer

The Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method has been applied successfully in a wide range of settings since its first introduction by Giles (2008). When using only two levels, the method can be viewed as a kind of control-variate approach to…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-05-07 Yu Li , Antony Ware

We consider a class of finite time horizon nonlinear stochastic optimal control problem, where the control acts additively on the dynamics and the control cost is quadratic. This framework is flexible and has found applications in many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-26 Ajay Jasra , Jeremy Heng , Yaxian Xu , Adrian N. Bishop

Policy gradient methods have demonstrated success in reinforcement learning tasks that have high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. However, policy gradient methods are also notoriously sample inefficient. This can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-12 Ching-An Cheng , Xinyan Yan , Byron Boots

Sampling-based motion planning methods, while effective in high-dimensional spaces, often suffer from inefficiencies due to irregular sampling distributions, leading to suboptimal exploration of the configuration space. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Makram Chahine , T. Konstantin Rusch , Zach J. Patterson , Daniela Rus

This work introduces a novel multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) metamodeling approach for variance function estimation. Although devising an efficient experimental design for simulation metamodeling can be elusive, the MLMC-based approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-22 Jingtao Zhang , Xi Chen

Neural control variates (NCVs) have emerged as a powerful tool for variance reduction in Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, particularly in high-dimensional problems where traditional control variates are difficult to construct analytically. By…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2025-08-22 Hyunwoo Oh

Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is an approach for computing ground-state wavefunctions that has recently become more powerful due to the introduction of neural network-based wavefunction parametrizations. However, efficiently training neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Robert J. Webber , Michael Lindsey

Modern quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods often capture electron correlation through both explicitly correlating Jastrow factors and small to mid-sized configuration interaction (CI) expansions. Here, we study the additional optimization…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2023-02-08 Scott M. Garner , Eric Neuscamman

We analyze the accuracy and sample complexity of variational Monte Carlo approaches to simulate the dynamics of many-body quantum systems classically. By systematically studying the relevant stochastic estimators, we are able to: (i) prove…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-10-11 Alessandro Sinibaldi , Clemens Giuliani , Giuseppe Carleo , Filippo Vicentini

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

Nested Monte Carlo is widely used for risk estimation, but its efficiency is limited by the discontinuity of the indicator function and high computational cost. This paper proposes a nested Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method combined with…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-06 Yu Xu , Xiaoqun Wang

Black-box variational inference performance is sometimes hindered by the use of gradient estimators with high variance. This variance comes from two sources of randomness: Data subsampling and Monte Carlo sampling. While existing control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Xi Wang , Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke

While generally considered computationally expensive, Uncertainty Quantification using Monte Carlo sampling remains beneficial for applications with uncertainties of high dimension. As an extension of the naive Monte Carlo method, the…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Robert Hahn , Sebastian Schöps

This article presents a novel approach, named MCMP (Monte Carlo Motion Planning), to the problem of motion planning under uncertainty, i.e., to the problem of computing a low-cost path that fulfills probabilistic collision avoidance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2015-06-01 Lucas Janson , Edward Schmerling , Marco Pavone