Related papers: Population-Contrastive-Divergence: Does Consistenc…

Classification of sequence data is the topic of interest for dynamic Bayesian models and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). While the former can explicitly model the temporal dependencies between class variables, the latter have a capability…

Machine learning is becoming widely used in analyzing the thermodynamics of many-body condensed matter systems. Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) aided Monte Carlo simulations have sparked interest recently, as they manage to speed up…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

In the era of Big Data, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which are currently essential for Bayesian estimation, face significant computational challenges owing to their sequential nature. To achieve a faster and more effective…

We analyze the convergence rates of two popular variants of coordinate descent (CD): random CD (RCD), in which the coordinates are sampled uniformly at random, and random-permutation CD (RPCD), in which random permutations are used to…

Crowd counting models in highly congested areas confront two main challenges: weak localization ability and difficulty in differentiating between foreground and background, leading to inaccurate estimations. The reason is that objects in…

Efficient sampling from complex and high dimensional target distributions turns out to be a fundamental task in diverse disciplines such as scientific computing, statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a new kind of…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has transformed Bayesian model inference over the past three decades: mainly because of this, Bayesian inference is now a workhorse of applied scientists. Under general conditions, MCMC sampling converges…

Contrastive divergence is a popular method of training energy-based models, but is known to have difficulties with training stability. We propose an adaptation to improve contrastive divergence training by scrutinizing a gradient term that…

Cross-modality distillation arises as an important topic for data modalities containing limited knowledge such as depth maps and high-quality sketches. Such techniques are of great importance, especially for memory and privacy-restricted…

Restricted Boltzmann machines~(RBMs) and conditional RBMs~(CRBMs) are popular models for a wide range of applications. In previous work, learning on such models has been dominated by contrastive divergence~(CD) and its variants. Belief…

The Pseudo-Marginal (PM) algorithm is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method used to sample from a target distribution when its density is inaccessible, but can be estimated with a non-negative unbiased estimator. Its performance…

Contrastive learning, a dominant self-supervised technique, emphasizes similarity in representations between augmentations of the same input and dissimilarity for different ones. Although low contrastive loss often correlates with high…

We revisit the challenging problem of training Gaussian-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machines (GRBMs), introducing two innovations. We propose a novel Gibbs-Langevin sampling algorithm that outperforms existing methods like Gibbs…

Estimating predictive uncertainty is crucial for many computer vision tasks, from image classification to autonomous driving systems. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an sampling method for performing Bayesian inference. On the other hand,…

We propose a Las Vegas transformation of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). We denote our approach Markov Chain Las Vegas (MCLV). MCLV gives statistical guarantees in exchange for random…

Divergence is not only an important mathematical concept in information theory, but also applied to machine learning problems such as low-dimensional embedding, manifold learning, clustering, classification, and anomaly detection. We…

Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard…

Evaluating the degree of partisan districting (Gerrymandering) in a statistical framework typically requires an ensemble of districting plans which are drawn from a prescribed probability distribution that adheres to a realistic and…

Standard contrastive learning approaches usually require a large number of negatives for effective unsupervised learning and often exhibit slow convergence. We suspect this behavior is due to the suboptimal selection of negatives used for…