Related papers: Particle Smoothing Variational Objectives
The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method has been widely used to simulate incompressible and slightly compressible fluid flows. Adaptive refinement strategies to dynamically increase the resolution of the particles to capture sharp…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms were originally designed for estimating intractable conditional expectations within state-space models, but are now routinely used to generate approximate samples in the context of general-purpose…
Smoothing in state-space models amounts to computing the conditional distribution of the latent state trajectory, given observations, or expectations of functionals of the state trajectory with respect to this distributions. For models that…
Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods…
In this paper, we consider a broad class of nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, where one objective component is a nonsmooth weakly convex function composed with a linear operator. By integrating variable smoothing techniques…
Optimizing large-scale nonconvex problems, common in deep learning, demands balancing rapid convergence with computational efficiency. First-order (FO) optimizers, which serve as today's baselines, provide fast convergence and good…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, are simulation-based recursive algorithms for the approximation of the a posteriori probability measures generated by state-space dynamical models. At any given time $t$,…
In the last decade, sequential Monte-Carlo methods (SMC) emerged as a key tool in computational statistics. These algorithms approximate a sequence of distributions by a sequence of weighted empirical measures associated to a weighted…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods comprise one of the most successful approaches to approximate Bayesian filtering. However, SMC without good proposal distributions struggle in high dimensions. We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo…
We propose a proximal variable smoothing algorithm for nonsmooth optimization problem with sum of three functions involving weakly convex composite function. The proposed algorithm is designed as a time-varying forward-backward splitting…
This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…
The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…
In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…
Filtering and smoothing algorithms for linear discrete-time state-space models with skew-t distributed measurement noise are presented. The proposed algorithms improve upon our earlier proposed filter and smoother using the mean field…
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), also known as particle filters, has been widely accepted as a powerful computational tool for making inference with dynamical systems. A key step in SMC is resampling, which plays the role of steering the…
It has been well documented that the use of exponentially-averaged momentum (EM) in particle swarm optimization (PSO) is advantageous over the vanilla PSO algorithm. In the single-objective setting, it leads to faster convergence and…
A great deal of research has been conducted in the consideration of meta-heuristic optimisation methods that are able to find global optima in settings that gradient based optimisers have traditionally struggled. Of these, so-called…
We propose two new Bayesian smoothing methods for general state-space models with unknown parameters. The first approach is based on the particle learning and smoothing algorithm, but with an adjustment in the backward resampling weights.…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…