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This paper proposes a synergy of amortised and particle-based methods for sampling from distributions defined by unnormalised density functions. We state a connection between sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and neural sequential samplers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sanghyeok Choi , Sarthak Mittal , Víctor Elvira , Jinkyoo Park , Nikolay Malkin

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…

Computation · Statistics 2021-10-27 James A. Brofos , Marylou Gabrié , Marcus A. Brubaker , Roy R. Lederman

We investigate the properties of a sequential Monte Carlo method where the particle weight that appears in the algorithm is estimated by a positive, unbiased estimator. We present broadly-applicable convergence results, including a central…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-26 Paul B. Rohrbach , Robert L. Jack

Self-learning Monte Carlo (SLMC) methods are recently proposed to accelerate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods using a machine learning model. With latent generative models, SLMC methods realize efficient Monte Carlo updates with less…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-21 Yuma Ichikawa , Akira Nakagawa , Hiromoto Masayuki , Yuhei Umeda

Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-12 Yizhe Zhang , Changyou Chen , Zhe Gan , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state of the art method for sampling from distributions with differentiable densities, but can converge slowly when applied to challenging multimodal problems. Running HMC with a time varying Hamiltonian,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-26 Reuben Cohn-Gordon , Uroš Seljak , Dries Sels

Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-22 Carsten Hartmann , Lorenz Richter

Bayesian inference is useful to obtain a predictive distribution with a small generalization error. However, since posterior distributions are rarely evaluated analytically, we employ the variational Bayesian inference or sampling method to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yohei Saito , Shun Kimura , Koujin Takeda

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have recently shown successful results for conditional sampling of generative diffusion models. In this paper we propose a new diffusion posterior SMC sampler achieving improved statistical efficiencies,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Zheng Zhao

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

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…

Computation · Statistics 2023-01-24 Efthyvoulos Drousiotis , Paul G. Spirakis , Simon Maskell

Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Anze Slosar , Michael Hobson

We introduce a new class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, which we call free energy SMC. This class is inspired by free energy methods, which originate from Physics, and where one samples from a biased distribution such that a given…

Computation · Statistics 2010-06-16 Nicolas Chopin , Pierre Jacob

Multi-fidelity Monte Carlo (MFMC) is a variance reduction method that leverages a multi-fidelity ensemble of models of varying cost and accuracy levels. Constructing an MFMC estimator with optimal variance requires knowledge of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-25 Michael Stanley , Thomas Coons , Geoffrey Bomarito , Patrick Leser , Joshua Pribe , James Warner

We show how to speed up Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for Bayesian inference in large data problems by data subsampling. SMC sequentially updates a cloud of particles through a sequence of distributions, beginning with a distribution that is…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-25 David Gunawan , Khue-Dung Dang , Matias Quiroz , Robert Kohn , Minh-Ngoc Tran

Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-25 Robert Nishihara , Iain Murray , Ryan P. Adams

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

The Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) approach usually works well when estimating the expected value of a quantity which is a Lipschitz function of intermediate quantities, but if it is a discontinuous function it can lead to a much slower…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-09-06 Michael B Giles

This work presents self-rewarding sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), an inference-time scaling algorithm enabling effective sampling of masked diffusion language models (MDLMs). Our algorithm stems from the observation that most existing MDLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ziwei Luo , Ziqi Jin , Lei Wang , Lidong Bing , Thomas B. Schön