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Bayesian parameter inference for complex stochastic simulators is challenging due to intractable likelihood functions. Existing simulation-based inference methods often require large number of simulations and become costly to use in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Vasilis Gkolemis , Christos Diou , Michael U. Gutmann

Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-17 Xiaohao Cai , Jason D. McEwen , Marcelo Pereyra

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

The note studies the problem of selecting a good enough subset out of a finite number of alternatives under a fixed simulation budget. Our work aims to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting a good subset. We formulate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-09 Gongbo Zhang , Bin Chen , Qing-shan Jia , Yijie Peng

We propose a novel class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms, appropriate for inference in probabilistic graphical models. This class of algorithms adopts a divide-and-conquer approach based upon an auxiliary tree-structured…

Sampling from the equilibrium distribution has always been a major problem in molecular simulations due to the very high dimensionality of conformational space. Over several decades, many approaches have been used to overcome the problem.…

Computational Physics · Physics 2020-03-02 Adrià Pérez , Pablo Herrera-Nieto , Stefan Doerr , Gianni De Fabritiis

Deterministic dynamics is an essential part of many MCMC algorithms, e.g. Hybrid Monte Carlo or samplers utilizing normalizing flows. This paper presents a general construction of deterministic measure-preserving dynamics using autonomous…

Computation · Statistics 2021-06-21 Kirill Neklyudov , Roberto Bondesan , Max Welling

Assessing the capabilities and risks of frontier AI systems is a critical area of research, and recent work has shown that repeated sampling from models can dramatically increase both. For instance, repeated sampling has been shown to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Joshua Kazdan , Rylan Schaeffer , Youssef Allouah , Colin Sullivan , Kyssen Yu , Noam Levi , Sanmi Koyejo

We present a new approach to sample from generic binary distributions, based on an exact Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm applied to a piecewise continuous augmentation of the binary distribution of interest. An extension of this idea to…

Computation · Statistics 2015-10-13 Ari Pakman , Liam Paninski

Hierarchical Bayesian inference is often conducted with estimates of the target distribution derived from Monte Carlo sums over samples from separate analyses of parts of the hierarchy or from mock observations used to estimate sensitivity…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-04-04 Reed Essick , Will Farr

The performance of the Monte Carlo sampling methods relies on the crucial choice of a proposal density. The notion of optimality is fundamental to design suitable adaptive procedures of the proposal density within Monte Carlo schemes. This…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-24 Fernando Llorente , Luca Martino

Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-11-30 Xu Chen , Shaan Qamar , Surya T. Tokdar

In this report, we survey Bayesian Optimization methods focussed on the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. We take the help of the paper "Portfolio Allocation for Bayesian Optimization". We report a small literature survey on the acquisition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Abhilash Nandy , Chandan Kumar , Deepak Mewada , Soumya Sharma

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

The multi-armed restless bandit problem is studied in the case where the pay-off distributions are stationary $\varphi$-mixing. This version of the problem provides a more realistic model for most real-world applications, but cannot be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-12-31 Steffen Grunewalder , Azadeh Khaleghi

In computational science workflows, it is often the case that 1) objective functions for optimization involve multiple simulation outputs, and 2) those simulations can be performed (at least partially) in parallel. In this work, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Matt Menickelly

To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…

Computation · Statistics 2020-04-09 Lewis J. Rendell , Adam M. Johansen , Anthony Lee , Nick Whiteley

There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…

Computation · Statistics 2016-12-28 Cheng Li , Sanvesh Srivastava , David B. Dunson

Sampling from discrete distributions is a ubiquitous task in machine learning, recently revisited by the emergence of discrete diffusion models. While Langevin algorithms constitute the state of the art for continuous spaces, discrete…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Armand Gissler , Saeed Saremi , Francis Bach

We formulate the problem of sampling and recovering clustered graph signal as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. This formulation lends naturally to learning sampling strategies using the well-known gradient MAB algorithm. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Oleksii Abramenko , Alexander Jung