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The wave-function Monte-Carlo method, also referred to as the use of "quantum-jump trajectories", allows efficient simulation of open systems by independently tracking the evolution of many pure-state "trajectories". This method is ideally…

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method and exhibit its efficiency by simulation and high-dimensional asymptotic theory. Key fact is that our algorithm has a reversible proposal transition kernel,…

We propose MDP-GapE, a new trajectory-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm for planning in a Markov Decision Process in which transitions have a finite support. We prove an upper bound on the number of calls to the generative models…

Sampling-based motion planning techniques have emerged as an efficient algorithmic paradigm for solving complex motion planning problems. These approaches use a set of probing samples to construct an implicit graph representation of the…

A number of algorithms have been developed to solve probabilistic inference problems on belief networks. These algorithms can be divided into two main groups: exact techniques which exploit the conditional independence revealed when the…

Markov chain Monte Carlo is a widely-used technique for generating a dependent sequence of samples from complex distributions. Conventionally, these methods require a source of independent random variates. Most implementations use…

Metastability is a physical phenomenon ubiquitous in first order phase transitions. A fruitful mathematical way to approach this phenomenon is the study of rare transitions Markov chains. For Metropolis chains associated with Statistical…

Markov automata combine non-determinism, probabilistic branching, and exponentially distributed delays. This compositional variant of continuous-time Markov decision processes is used in reliability engineering, performance evaluation and…

The present paper focuses on the problem of sampling from a given target distribution $\pi$ defined on some general state space. To this end, we introduce a novel class of non-reversible Markov chains, each chain being defined on an…

Experiments, in particular on biological systems, typically probe lower-dimensional observables which are projections of high-dimensional dynamics. In order to infer consistent models capturing the relevant dynamics of the system, it is…

We consider systems of stochastic differential equations with multiple scales and small noise and assume that the coefficients of the equations are ergodic and stationary random fields. Our goal is to construct provably-efficient importance…

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are a powerful tool for sampling equilibrium configurations in complex systems. One problem these methods often face is slow convergence over large energy barriers. In this work, we propose a novel method…

In this manuscript, inspired by a simpler reformulation of primary sample space Metropolis light transport, we derive a novel family of general Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms called charted Metropolis-Hastings, that introduces the…

We study time-changed Markov processes to speed up the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. The time-changed process is defined by adjusting the speed of time of a base process via a user-chosen, state-dependent…

We investigate in this paper an alternative method to simulation based recursive importance sampling procedure to estimate the optimal change of measure for Monte Carlo simulations. We propose an algorithm which combines (vector and…

We describe an adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo method suitable for the estimation of rare failure probabilities in complex probabilistic models. This method, the Accelerated Weight Histogram (AWH) method, has its origin in statistical…

We treat the problem of risk-aware control for stochastic shortest path (SSP) on Markov decision processes (MDP). Typically, expectation is considered for SSP, which however is oblivious to the incurred risk. We present an alternative view,…

Bisimulation metrics are powerful tools for measuring similarities between stochastic processes, and specifically Markov chains. Recent advances have uncovered that bisimulation metrics are, in fact, optimal-transport distances, which has…

Computing partition functions, the normalizing constants of probability distributions, is often hard. Variants of importance sampling give unbiased estimates of a normalizer Z, however, unbiased estimates of the reciprocal 1/Z are harder to…

Transition path theory (TPT) for diffusion processes is a framework for analysing the transitions of multiscale ergodic diffusion processes between disjoint metastable subsets of state space. Most methods for applying TPT involve the…