Related papers: Neural Control Variates
Self-supervised learning methods for computer vision have demonstrated the effectiveness of pre-training feature representations, resulting in well-generalizing Deep Neural Networks, even if the annotated data are limited. However,…
The optimization of neural wave functions in variational Monte Carlo crucially relies on a robust convergence criterion. While the energy variance is theoretically a definitive measure, its practical application as a primary convergence…
Policy gradient methods have demonstrated success in reinforcement learning tasks that have high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. However, policy gradient methods are also notoriously sample inefficient. This can be…
Monte Carlo (MC) integration is an important calculational technique in the physical sciences. Practical considerations require that the calculations are performed as accurately as possible for a given set of computational resources. To…
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…
Variance reduction techniques are of crucial importance for the efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations in finance applications. We propose the use of neural SDEs, with control variates parameterized by neural networks, in order to learn…
A non-parametric extension of control variates is presented. These leverage gradient information on the sampling density to achieve substantial variance reduction. It is not required that the sampling density be normalised. The novel…
In this paper a novel modification of the multilevel Monte Carlo approach, allowing for further significant complexity reduction, is proposed. The idea of the modification is to use the method of control variates to reduce variance at level…
Many popular statistical models for complex phenomena are intractable, in the sense that the likelihood function cannot easily be evaluated. Bayesian estimation in this setting remains challenging, with a lack of computational methodology…
Control of complex systems involves both system identification and controller design. Deep neural networks have proven to be successful in many identification tasks, however, from model-based control perspective, these networks are…
We propose to use deep neural networks for generating samples in Monte Carlo integration. Our work is based on non-linear independent components estimation (NICE), which we extend in numerous ways to improve performance and enable its…
Deep learning has shown great potential in image and video compression tasks. However, it brings bit savings at the cost of significant increases in coding complexity, which limits its potential for implementation within practical…
Power system voltage regulation is crucial to maintain power quality while integrating intermittent renewable resources in distribution grids. However, the system model on the grid edge is often unknown, making it difficult to model…
It is well known that Monte Carlo integration with variance reduction by means of control variates can be implemented by the ordinary least squares estimator for the intercept in a multiple linear regression model. A central limit theorem…
We present an unbiased numerical integration algorithm that handles both low-frequency regions and high frequency details of multidimensional integrals. It combines quadrature and Monte Carlo integration, by using a quadrature-base…
Although Monte Carlo path tracing is a simple and effective algorithm to synthesize photo-realistic images, it is often very slow to converge to noise-free results when involving complex global illumination. One of the most successful…
Zero-variance control variates (ZV-CV) are a post-processing method to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators of expectations using the derivatives of the log target. Once the derivatives are available, the only additional…
Variational inference is increasingly being addressed with stochastic optimization. In this setting, the gradient's variance plays a crucial role in the optimization procedure, since high variance gradients lead to poor convergence. A…
Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…
Monte Carlo estimation in plays a crucial role in stochastic reaction networks. However, reducing the statistical uncertainty of the corresponding estimators requires sampling a large number of trajectories. We propose control variates…