English
Related papers

Related papers: Non-Asymptotic Guarantees For Sampling by Stochast…

200 papers

In this article, we study the problem of sampling from distributions whose densities are not necessarily smooth nor logconcave. We propose a simple Langevin-based algorithm that does not rely on popular but computationally challenging…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Tim Johnston , Iosif Lytras , Nikolaos Makras , Sotirios Sabanis

Traditional gradient-based sampling methods, like standard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, require that the desired target distribution is continuous and differentiable. This limits the types of models one can define, although the presented models…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-28 Jimmy Huy Tran , Tore Selland Kleppe

We generalize stochastic subgradient descent methods to situations in which we do not receive independent samples from the distribution over which we optimize, but instead receive samples that are coupled over time. We show that as long as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-08-02 John C. Duchi , Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Johansson , Michael I. Jordan

We develop a theoretical framework for studying numerical estimation of lower previsions, generally applicable to two-level Monte Carlo methods, importance sampling methods, and a wide range of other sampling methods one might devise. We…

Computation · Statistics 2018-07-12 Matthias C. M. Troffaes

We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Difan Zou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

For the task of sampling from a density $\pi \propto \exp(-V)$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $V$ is possibly non-convex but $L$-gradient Lipschitz, we prove that averaged Langevin Monte Carlo outputs a sample with $\varepsilon$-relative Fisher…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-11 Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Sinho Chewi , Murat A. Erdogdu , Adil Salim , Matthew Zhang

Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-03-28 Carsten Hartmann , Christof Schütte , Marcus Weber , Wei Zhang

Federated learning performed by a decentralized networks of agents is becoming increasingly important with the prevalence of embedded software on autonomous devices. Bayesian approaches to learning benefit from offering more information as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Adam Cobb , Tara Javidi , Brian Jalaian

As sample sizes grow, scalability has become a central concern in the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. One general approach to this problem, exemplified by the popular stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD)…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-04 Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith , Azeem Zaman

This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-21 Nahom Seyoum , Haoxiang You

High-dimensional count data poses significant challenges for statistical analysis, necessitating effective methods that also preserve explainability. We focus on a low rank constrained variant of the Poisson log-normal model, which relates…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Bastien Batardière , Julien Chiquet , Joon Kwon , Julien Stoehr

Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-29 Chris J. Oates , Jon Cockayne , François-Xavier Briol , Mark Girolami

In this chapter, we discuss recent work on learning sparse approximations to high-dimensional functions on data, where the target functions may be scalar-, vector- or even Hilbert space-valued. Our main objective is to study how the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-02-08 Ben Adcock , Juan M. Cardenas , Nick Dexter , Sebastian Moraga

Sampling from multimodal distributions is a challenging task in scientific computing. When a distribution has an exact symmetry between the modes, direct jumps among them can accelerate the samplings significantly. However, the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-01-05 Lexing Ying

We describe a general strategy for sampling configurations from a given distribution, NOT based on the standard Metropolis (Markov chain) strategy. It uses the fact that nontrivial problems in statistical physics are high dimensional and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-07 P. Grassberger

Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-26 Niladri S. Chatterji , Jelena Diakonikolas , Michael I. Jordan , Peter L. Bartlett

In order to solve tasks like uncertainty quantification or hypothesis tests in Bayesian imaging inverse problems, we often have to draw samples from the arising posterior distribution. For the usually log-concave but high-dimensional…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-23 Matthias J. Ehrhardt , Lorenz Kuger , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

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.…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-04 Willem van den Boom , Andrea Cremaschi , Alexandre H. Thiery

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or stochastic approximation has been widely used in model training and stochastic optimization. While there is a huge literature on analyzing its convergence, inference on the obtained solutions from SGD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-01 Henry Lam , Zitong Wang

We study the efficiency of Thompson sampling for contextual bandits. Existing Thompson sampling-based algorithms need to construct a Laplace approximation (i.e., a Gaussian distribution) of the posterior distribution, which is inefficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Pan Xu , Hongkai Zheng , Eric Mazumdar , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Anima Anandkumar