Related papers: Informed Proposal Monte Carlo
It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…
Most of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms in existing probabilistic programming systems suboptimally use only model priors as proposal distributions. In this work, we describe an approach for…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
Incorporating information about the target distribution in proposal mechanisms generally produces efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (or at least, algorithms that are more efficient than uninformed counterparts). For instance, it…
In image processing, solving inverse problems is the task of finding plausible reconstructions of an image that was corrupted by some (usually known) degradation operator. Commonly, this process is done using a generative image model that…
We propose a Monte Carlo sampler from the reverse diffusion process. Unlike the practice of diffusion models, where the intermediary updates -- the score functions -- are learned with a neural network, we transform the score matching…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…
We consider the task of MCMC sampling from a distribution defined on a discrete space. Building on recent insights provided in [Zan19], we devise a class of efficient continuous-time, non-reversible algorithms which make active use of the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…
We present an efficient algorithm for the inference of stochastic block models in large networks. The algorithm can be used as an optimized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, with a fast mixing time and a much reduced susceptibility to…
Sampling-based motion planning methods, while effective in high-dimensional spaces, often suffer from inefficiencies due to irregular sampling distributions, leading to suboptimal exploration of the configuration space. In this paper, we…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…