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Discrete diffusion models have become highly effective across various domains. However, real-world applications often require the generative process to adhere to certain constraints. To this end, we propose a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zijing Ou , Chinmay Pani , Yingzhen Li

In many real-world engineering systems, the performance or reliability of the system is characterised by a scalar parameter. The distribution of this performance parameter is important in many uncertainty quantification problems, ranging…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-03 Robert Millar , Jinglai Li , Hui Li

The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 Jonas Latz , Iason Papaioannou , Elisabeth Ullmann

Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hany Abdulsamad , Sahel Iqbal , Simo Särkkä

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are powerful tools for Bayesian inference but suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on large particle ensembles for accurate estimates. We introduce persistent sampling (PS), an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Minas Karamanis , Uroš Seljak

Resilience is emerging as a key requirement for next-generation wireless communication systems, requiring the ability to assess and control rare, path-dependent failure events arising from sequential degradation and delayed recovery. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Onel Luis Alcaraz López

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is a popular class of methods for sampling from an intractable target distribution using a sequence of simpler intermediate distributions. Like other importance sampling-based methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-18 Shixiang Gu , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner

One of the key challenges in identifying nonlinear and possibly non-Gaussian state space models (SSMs) is the intractability of estimating the system state. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, such as the particle filter (introduced more…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-17 Christopher Nemeth , Paul Fearnhead

Estimating failure probabilities of engineering systems is an important problem in many engineering fields. In this work we consider such problems where the failure probability is extremely small (e.g $\leq10^{-10}$). In this case, standard…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-05-24 Xinjuan Chen , Jinglai Li

Uncertainty estimation in deep models is essential in many real-world applications and has benefited from developments over the last several years. Recent evidence suggests that existing solutions dependent on simple Gaussian formulations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Jurijs Nazarovs , Ronak R. Mehta , Vishnu Suresh Lokhande , Vikas Singh

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates language model inference by drafting tokens from a cheap proposal model and verifying them against an expensive target model via rejection sampling. Because rejection truncates the draft block at the…

Ill-posed linear inverse problems arise frequently in various applications, from computational photography to medical imaging. A recent line of research exploits Bayesian inference with informative priors to handle the ill-posedness of such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-27 Gabriel Cardoso , Yazid Janati El Idrissi , Sylvain Le Corff , Eric Moulines

Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-20 Chenguang Dai , Jeremy Heng , Pierre E. Jacob , Nick Whiteley

We introduce Preconditioned Monte Carlo (PMC), a novel Monte Carlo method for Bayesian inference that facilitates efficient sampling of probability distributions with non-trivial geometry. PMC utilises a Normalising Flow (NF) in order to…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-08-24 Minas Karamanis , Florian Beutler , John A. Peacock , David Nabergoj , Uros Seljak

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-11-15 Matthias Morzfeld , Marcus S. Day , Ray W. Grout , George Shu Heng Pau , Stefan A. Finsterle , John B. Bell

Nonlinear non-Gaussian state-space models arise in numerous applications in statistics and signal processing. In this context, one of the most successful and popular approximation techniques is the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm,…

Computation · Statistics 2016-04-20 Francois Septier , Gareth W. Peters

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-05 Alexander Buchholz , Florian Wenzel , Stephan Mandt

This paper addresses the problem of Monte Carlo approximation of posterior probability distributions. In particular, we have considered a recently proposed technique known as population Monte Carlo (PMC), which is based on an iterative…

Computation · Statistics 2016-06-03 Eugenia Koblents , Joaquín Míguez

In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling approach to draw samples from posterior shape distributions for image segmentation. The computation time of the proposed approach is independent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Ertunc Erdil , Sinan Yildirim , Tolga Tasdizen , Mujdat Cetin