Related papers: Rate optimality of Random walk Metropolis algorith…
One of the most important properties of high dimensional expanders is that high dimensional random walks converge rapidly. This property has proven to be extremely useful in variety of fields in the theory of computer science from agreement…
Numerous problems of both theoretical and practical interest are related to finding shortest (or otherwise optimal) paths in networks, frequently in the presence of some obstacles or constraints. A somewhat related class of problems focuses…
Probabilistic sampling-based algorithms, such as the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) and the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) algorithms, represent one of the most successful approaches to robotic motion planning, due to their strong…
Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…
To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…
The Metropolis-Hastings method is often used to construct a Markov chain with a given $\pi$ as its stationary distribution. The method works even if $\pi$ is known only up to an intractable constant of proportionality. Polynomial time…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a widely used sampler for continuous probability distributions. In many cases, the underlying Hamiltonian dynamics exhibit a phenomenon of resonance which decreases the efficiency of the algorithm and makes…
Researchers have designed many algorithms to measure the distances between graph nodes, such as average hitting times of random walks, cosine distances from DeepWalk, personalized PageRank, etc. Successful although these algorithms are,…
We present a comparative study of several algorithms for an in-plane random walk with a variable step. The goal is to check the efficiency of the algorithm in the case where the random walk terminates at some boundary. We recently found…
We generalize the Metropolis et al. random walk algorithm to the situation where the energy is noisy and can only be estimated. Two possible applications are for long range potentials and for mixed quantum-classical simulations. If the…
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded…
We describe ergodic properties of some Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithms for heavy-tailed target distributions. The analysis usually falls into sub-geometric ergodicity framework but we prove that the mixed preconditioned Crank-Nicolson…
This paper addresses consensus optimization problems in a multi-agent network, where all agents collaboratively find a minimizer for the sum of their private functions. We develop a new decentralized algorithm in which each agent…
The Reversible Jump algorithm is one of the most widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for Bayesian estimation and model selection. A generalized multiple-try version of this algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is based on…
This work develops a powerful and versatile framework for determining acceptance ratios in Metropolis-Hastings type Markov kernels widely used in statistical sampling problems. Our approach allows us to derive new classes of kernels which…
We present large deviations estimates in the supremum norm for a system of independent random walks superposed with a birth-and-death dynamics evolving on the discrete torus with $N$ sites. The scaling limit considered is the so-called…
This article extends the results of Fang & Zeitouni (2012a) on branching random walks (BRWs) with Gaussian increments in time inhomogeneous environments. We treat the case where the variance of the increments changes a finite number of…
In this paper we study the ergodicity properties of some adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) that have been recently proposed in the literature. We prove that under a set of verifiable conditions, ergodic averages calculated…
The multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) algorithm is an extension of the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm by selecting the proposed state among multiple trials according to some weight function. Although MTM has gained great popularity owing to…
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm allows one to sample asymptotically from any probability distribution $\pi$. There has been recently much work devoted to the development of variants of the MH update which can handle scenarios where such…