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Related papers: Neural Control Variates for Variance Reduction

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We provide a collection of results on covariance expressions between Monte Carlo based multi-output mean, variance, and Sobol main effect variance estimators from an ensemble of models. These covariances can be used within multi-fidelity…

Computation · Statistics 2024-07-01 Thomas O. Dixon , James E. Warner , Geoffrey F. Bomarito , Alex A. Gorodetsky

In this paper, we extend a recently introduced multi-fidelity control variate for the uncertainty quantification of the Boltzmann equation to the case of kinetic models arising in the study of multiagent systems. For these phenomena, where…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-02-05 Lorenzo Pareschi , Torsten Trimborn , Mattia Zanella

We study a variance reduction strategy based on control variables for simulating the averaged macroscopic behavior of a stochastic slow-fast system. We assume that this averaged behavior can be written in terms of a few slow degrees of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-09-16 Ward Melis , Giovanni Samaey

Classical algorithms in numerical analysis for numerical integration (quadrature/cubature) follow the principle of approximate and integrate: the integrand is approximated by a simple function (e.g. a polynomial), which is then integrated…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-06-15 Yuji Nakatsukasa

We train a pair of autoregressive models to construct zero-mean control variates to mitigate the sign problem in quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The two autoregressive networks are confined to the positive- and negative-sign sectors with…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2026-05-27 Bei Qiao , Lei Wang

Variance reduction techniques are of crucial importance for the efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations in finance applications. We propose the use of neural SDEs, with control variates parameterized by neural networks, in order to learn…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-02-06 P. D. Hinds , M. V. Tretyakov

This paper examines the use of Monte Carlo simulations to understand statistical concepts in A/B testing and Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). We discuss the applicability of simulations in understanding false positive rates and estimate…

Applications · Statistics 2024-11-12 Márton Trencséni

This paper is a broad and accessible survey of the methods we have at our disposal for Monte Carlo gradient estimation in machine learning and across the statistical sciences: the problem of computing the gradient of an expectation of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-30 Shakir Mohamed , Mihaela Rosca , Michael Figurnov , Andriy Mnih

Building upon recent developments of force-based estimators with a reduced variance for the computation of densities, radial distribution functions or local transport properties from molecular simulations, we show that the variance can be…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2021-05-18 Samuel W. Coles , Etienne Mangaud , Daan Frenkel , Benjamin Rotenberg

Reinforcement learning (RL) experiments have notoriously high variance, and minor details can have disproportionately large effects on measured outcomes. This is problematic for creating reproducible research and also serves as an obstacle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Johan Bjorck , Carla P. Gomes , Kilian Q. Weinberger

Shapley values are among the most popular tools for explaining predictions of blackbox machine learning models. However, their high computational cost motivates the use of sampling approximations, inducing a considerable degree of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-11 Jeremy Goldwasser , Giles Hooker

When dealing with difficult inverse problems such as inverse rendering, using Monte Carlo estimated gradients to optimise parameters can slow down convergence due to variance. Averaging many gradient samples in each iteration reduces this…

Graphics · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Martin Balint , Karol Myszkowski , Hans-Peter Seidel , Gurprit Singh

We propose a variance reduction framework for variational inference using the Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method. Our framework is built on reparameterized gradient estimators and "recycles" parameters obtained from past update history in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-03 Masahiro Fujisawa , Issei Sato

Monte Carlo integration is a commonly used technique to compute intractable integrals and is typically thought to perform poorly for very high-dimensional integrals. To show that this is not always the case, we examine Monte Carlo…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-26 Yanbo Tang

We present simple and practical strategies to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators. Our focus is on variational Monte Carlo calculations of atomic forces and pressure in electronic systems, although we show that the underlying…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2026-03-17 David Linteau , Saverio Moroni , Giuseppe Carleo , Markus Holzmann

We overview a series of recent works devoted to variance reduction techniques for numerical stochastic homogenization. Numerical homogenization requires solving a set of problems at the micro scale, the so-called corrector problems. In a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-04-27 Xavier Blanc , Claude Le Bris , Frederic Legoll

The theme of the present paper is numerical integration of $C^r$ functions using randomized methods. We consider variance reduction methods that consist in two steps. First the initial interval is partitioned into subintervals and the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-06-21 Leszek Plaskota , Paweł Przybyłowicz , Łukasz Stępień

We propose a new way of training neural networks, with the goal of reducing training cost. Our method uses approximate predicted gradients instead of the full gradients that require an expensive backward pass. We derive a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Kamil Ciosek , Nicolò Felicioni , Juan Elenter Litwin

Variance reduction techniques have been shown by others in the past to be a useful tool to reduce variance in Simulation studies. However, their application and success in the past has been mainly domain specific, with relatively little…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2013-06-03 Adrian Adewunmi , Uwe Aickelin

We show that Markov couplings can be used to improve the accuracy of Markov chain Monte Carlo calculations in some situations where the steady-state probability distribution is not explicitly known. The technique generalizes the notion of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-05-13 Jonathan B. Goodman , Kevin K. Lin