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Related papers: Quasi-Monte Carlo Variational Inference

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Solving partial differential equations in high dimensions by deep neural network has brought significant attentions in recent years. In many scenarios, the loss function is defined as an integral over a high-dimensional domain. Monte-Carlo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Jingrun Chen , Rui Du , Panchi Li , Liyao Lyu

Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo methods present a convenient approach for approximating the expected value of a random variable. Algorithms exist to adaptively sample the random variable until a user defined absolute error tolerance is…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-11-14 Aleksei G. Sorokin , Jagadeeswaran Rathinavel

When combined with highly expressive ansatz functions such as neural quantum states, variational Monte Carlo (VMC) constitutes a versatile numerical approach to tackle the quantum many-body problem in and out of equilibrium. However, its…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-06 Wladislaw Krinitsin , Markus Schmitt

We study signal processing tasks in which the signal is mapped via some generalized time-frequency transform to a higher dimensional time-frequency space, processed there, and synthesized to an output signal. We show how to approximate such…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Ron Levie , Haim Avron , Gitta Kutyniok

The classical approaches to numerically integrating a function $f$ are Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. MC methods use random samples to evaluate $f$ and have error $O(\sigma(f)/\sqrt{n})$, where $\sigma(f)$ is the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Nikhil Bansal , Haotian Jiang

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-31 Jakob Knollmüller , Torsten A. Enßlin

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods offer a principled approach to Bayesian uncertainty quantification but are traditionally limited by the need for full-batch gradient evaluations. We introduce a scalable variant by incorporating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Andrew Millard , Zheng Zhao , Joshua Murphy , Simon Maskell

Reinforcement learning constantly deals with hard integrals, for example when computing expectations in policy evaluation and policy iteration. These integrals are rarely analytically solvable and typically estimated with the Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Sebastien M. R. Arnold , Pierre L'Ecuyer , Liyu Chen , Yi-fan Chen , Fei Sha

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-21 Justin Domke

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

Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms (also known as particle filters) are popular methods to approximate filtering (and related) distributions of state-space models. However, they converge at the slow $1/\sqrt{N}$ rate, which may be an issue…

Computation · Statistics 2015-03-06 Nicolas Chopin , Mathieu Gerber

In Variational Inference (VI), coordinate-ascent and gradient-based approaches are two major types of algorithms for approximating difficult-to-compute probability densities. In real-world implementations of complex models, Monte Carlo…

Computation · Statistics 2019-10-18 Lifeng Ye , Alexandros Beskos , Maria De Iorio , Jie Hao

Traditionally, the field of computational Bayesian statistics has been divided into two main subfields: variational methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In recent years, however, several methods have been proposed based on combining…

Computation · Statistics 2017-04-19 Cheng Zhang , Babak Shahbaba , Hongkai Zhao

Sampling from complicated probability distributions is a hard computational problem arising in many fields, including statistical physics, optimization, and machine learning. Quantum computers have recently been used to sample from…

We consider the problem of estimating the density of a random variable $X$ that can be sampled exactly by Monte Carlo (MC). We investigate the effectiveness of replacing MC by randomized quasi Monte Carlo (RQMC) or by stratified sampling…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-03-12 Amal Ben Abdellah , Pierre L'Ecuyer , Art B. Owen , Florian Puchhammer

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-08 Brendan D. Tracey , David H. Wolpert

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

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 design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-08-26 Søren Taverniers , Daniel M. Tartakovsky