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

The Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) can be used either as classifiers or as generative models. The quality of the generative RBM is measured through the average log-likelihood on test data. Due to the high computational complexity of…

Most of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms in existing probabilistic programming systems suboptimally use only model priors as proposal distributions. In this work, we describe an approach for…

This study proposes a trainable sampling-based solver for combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) using a deep-learning technique called deep unfolding. The proposed solver is based on the Ohzeki method that combines Markov-chain…

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…

Bayesian methods provide an elegant framework for estimating parameter posteriors and quantification of uncertainty associated with probabilistic models. However, they often suffer from slow inference times. To address this challenge,…

This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates proposals for a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by simulating the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system. However, HMC is sensitive to large time…

We consider the problem of estimating the measure of subsets in very large networks. A prime tool for this purpose is the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. This algorithm, while extremely useful in many cases, still often suffers…

Knowing the uncertainty associated with the output of a deep neural network is of paramount importance in making trustworthy decisions, particularly in high-stakes fields like medical diagnosis and autonomous systems. Monte Carlo Dropout…

We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…

Multimodal Contrastive Learning (MCL) advances in aligning different modalities and generating multimodal representations in a joint space. By leveraging contrastive learning across diverse modalities, large-scale multimodal data enhances…

In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly…

Recent work has shown that representation learning plays a critical role in sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) from pixels. Unfortunately, in real-world scenarios, representation learning is usually fragile to task-irrelevant…

Boltzmann machines (BMs) are powerful energy-based generative models, but their heavy training cost has largely confined practical use to Restricted BMs (RBMs) trained with an efficient learning method called contrastive divergence. More…

In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…

Distribution learning finds probability density functions from a set of data samples, whereas clustering aims to group similar data points to form clusters. Although there are deep clustering methods that employ distribution learning…

Training Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) has been challenging for a long time due to the difficulty of computing precisely the log-likelihood gradient. Over the past decades, many works have proposed more or less successful training…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently improved mathematical reasoning through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR). However, existing RLVR algorithms require large query budgets, making annotation costly. We investigate…

Contrastive Decoding (CD) has emerged as an effective inference-time strategy for enhancing open-ended text generation by exploiting the divergence in output probabilities between a large expert language model and a smaller amateur model.…