Related papers: How well does your sampler really work?

Experimental comparisons of performance represent an important aspect of research on optimization algorithms. In this work we present a methodology for defining the required sample sizes for designing experiments with desired statistical…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a range of applications in zero-shot and few-shot learning settings, including the generation of synthetic datasets for training and testing. However, to reliably use these synthetic datasets, it is…

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has become increasingly popular for simulating posterior samples in large-scale Bayesian modeling. However, existing SG-MCMC schemes are not tailored to any specific probabilistic…

To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…

For many tasks of data analysis, we may only have the information of the explanatory variable and the evaluation of the response values are quite expensive. While it is impractical or too costly to obtain the responses of all units, a…

Sampling algorithms play a pivotal role in probabilistic AI. However, verifying if a sampler program indeed samples from the claimed distribution is a notoriously hard problem. Provably correct testers like Barbarik, Teq, Flash, CubeProbe…

Topic models, and more specifically the class of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), are widely used for probabilistic modeling of text. MCMC sampling from the posterior distribution is typically performed using a collapsed Gibbs sampler. We…

To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…

The stochastic nature of iterative optimization heuristics leads to inherently noisy performance measurements. Since these measurements are often gathered once and then used repeatedly, the number of collected samples will have a…

Recent advancements in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and surrogate modelling have significantly enhanced the feasibility of Bayesian analysis across engineering fields. However, the selection and integration of surrogate models…

Incomplete data are common in practical applications. Most predictive machine learning models do not handle missing values so they require some preprocessing. Although many algorithms are used for data imputation, we do not understand the…

In semi-supervised learning, the prevailing understanding suggests that observing additional unlabeled samples improves estimation accuracy for linear parameters only in the case of model misspecification. In this work, we challenge such a…

Machine learning (ML) models show strong promise for new biomedical prediction tasks, but concerns about trustworthiness have hindered their clinical adoption. In particular, it is often unclear whether a model relies on true clinical cues…

Use each of n exact samples as the initial state for a MCMC sampler run for m steps. We give confidence intervals for accuracy of estimators which are always valid and which, in certain settings, are almost as good as the intervals one…

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on many computer vision benchmarks in recent years. However, can we be confident that impressive performance on benchmarks will translate to strong performance in real-world…

Given a (machine learning) classifier and a collection of unlabeled data, how can we efficiently identify misclassification patterns presented in this dataset? To address this problem, we propose a human-machine collaborative framework that…

Improvement of statistical learning models in order to increase efficiency in solving classification or regression problems is still a goal pursued by the scientific community. In this way, the support vector machine model is one of the…

Employing Bayesian inference to calibrate constitutive model parameters has grown substantially in recent years. Among the available techniques, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling remains one of the most widely used approaches for…

Molecular optimization is a fundamental goal in the chemical sciences and is of central interest to drug and material design. In recent years, significant progress has been made in solving challenging problems across various aspects of…