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Autoencoders gained popularity in the deep learning revolution given their ability to compress data and provide dimensionality reduction. Although prominent deep learning methods have been used to enhance autoencoders, the need to provide…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
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…
In this paper we propose a novel and practical variance reduction approach for additive functionals of dependent sequences. Our approach combines the use of control variates with the minimisation of an empirical variance estimate. We…
Bayesian inference provides a methodology for parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in machine learning and deep learning methods. Variational inference and Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are used to…
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…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
Neural quantum states (NQS) have emerged as powerful tools for simulating many-body quantum systems, but their practical use is often hindered by limitations of current sampling techniques. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods suffer…
This paper introduces new efficient algorithms for two problems: sampling conditional on vertex degrees in unweighted graphs, and sampling conditional on vertex strengths in weighted graphs. The algorithms can sample conditional on the…
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…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…
Deep neural networks, when optimized with sufficient data, provide accurate representations of high-dimensional functions; in contrast, function approximation techniques that have predominated in scientific computing do not scale well with…
An introduction to numerical large-deviation sampling is provided. First, direct biasing with a known distribution is explained. As simple example, the Bernoulli experiment is used throughout the text. Next, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
An importance sampling and bagging approach to solving the support vector machine (SVM) problem in the context of large databases is presented and evaluated. Our algorithm builds on the nearest neighbors ideas presented in Camelo at al.…
Subgraph-wise sampling -- a promising class of mini-batch training techniques for graph neural networks (GNNs -- is critical for real-world applications. During the message passing (MP) in GNNs, subgraph-wise sampling methods discard…
Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…
Variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are two main approximate approaches for learning deep generative models by maximizing marginal likelihood. In this paper, we propose using annealed importance sampling for…