Related papers: Robust Covariance Adaptation in Adaptive Importanc…
We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically…
The quality and quantity of data used for training greatly influence the performance and effectiveness of deep learning models. In the context of error correction, it is essential to generate high-quality samples that are neither…
Model fitting is possibly the most extended problem in science. Classical approaches include the use of least-squares fitting procedures and maximum likelihood methods to estimate the value of the parameters in the model. However, in recent…
Growing scale of recommender systems require extensive tuning to respond to market dynamics and system changes. We address the challenge of tuning a large-scale ads recommendation platform with multiple continuous parameters influencing key…
We introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler called the Markov Interacting Importance Sampler (MIIS). The MIIS sampler uses conditional importance sampling (IS) approximations to jointly sample the current state of the Markov…
We show that the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator that is importance sampled from an exponential family is a convex function of the natural parameter of the distribution. With this insight, we propose an adaptive importance sampling…
Efficiently sampling from high-dimensional, multi-modal posteriors is a central challenge in Bayesian inference for astrophysics, especially gravitational-wave astronomy. Popular families of methods like Markov-chain Monte Carlo, nested…
Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) uses past samples to update the \textit{sampling policy} $q_t$ at each stage $t$. Each stage $t$ is formed with two steps : (i) to explore the space with $n_t$ points according to $q_t$ and (ii) to exploit…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
Multidimensional numerical integration is a central ingredient of theoretical predictions in high-energy physics, where multiloop Feynman diagrams and phase-space integrals are computationally demanding due to divergences and complex…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, such as the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, are widely used for Bayesian inference. One of the most important issues for any MCMC method is the convergence of the Markov chain, which depends…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) and related algorithms are highly effective tools for marginal likelihood estimation, but are not fully differentiable due to the use of Metropolis-Hastings correction steps. Differentiability is a…
We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Stochastic sampling algorithms, while an attractive alternative to exact algorithms in very large Bayesian network models, have been observed to perform poorly in evidential reasoning with extremely unlikely evidence. To address this…