Related papers: Langevin Monte Carlo: random coordinate descent an…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling methods provide a mechanism for defining distant proposals with high acceptance probabilities in a Metropolis-Hastings framework, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space than standard…

This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the Langevin Monte Carlo sampling algorithm recently introduced in Durmus et al. (Efficient Bayesian computation by proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo: when Langevin meets Moreau, 2016)…

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…

Likelihood-free methods, such as approximate Bayesian computation, are powerful tools for practical inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. Markov chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo variants of approximate…

We consider the computational efficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods applied to partial differential equations with random coefficients. These arise, for example, in groundwater flow modelling, where a…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…

We study the problem of approximate sampling from non-log-concave distributions, e.g., Gaussian mixtures, which is often challenging even in low dimensions due to their multimodality. We focus on performing this task via Markov chain Monte…

We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…

Langevin Dynamics is a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) central to sampling and generative modeling and is implemented via time discretization. Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), based on the Euler-Maruyama discretization, is the simplest…

Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods with additive noise. They have been used for decades in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and learning. Their convergence properties for unconstrained non-convex…

We propose a new framework of variance-reduced Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) methods for sampling from an $L$-smooth and $m$-strongly log-concave distribution, based on a unified formulation of biased and unbiased variance reduction…

We develop a framework that allows the use of the multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) methodology (Giles2015) to calculate expectations with respect to the invariant measure of an ergodic SDE. In that context, we study the (over-damped) Langevin…

Along with the recent advances in scalable Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, sampling techniques that are based on Langevin diffusions have started receiving increasing attention. These so called Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) methods are based…

Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…

Tuning the durations of the Hamiltonian flow in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (also called Hybrid Monte Carlo) (HMC) involves a tradeoff between computational cost and sampling quality, which is typically challenging to resolve in a satisfactory…

This work considers the problem of sampling from a probability distribution known up to a normalization constant while satisfying a set of statistical constraints specified by the expected values of general nonlinear functions. This problem…

We revisit the problem of sampling from a target distribution that has a smooth strongly log-concave density everywhere in $\mathbb R^p$. In this context, if no additional density information is available, the randomized midpoint…

The problem of posterior inference is central to Bayesian statistics and a wealth of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed to obtain asymptotically correct samples from the posterior. As datasets in applications grow…

The Multilevel Monte Carlo method is an efficient variance reduction technique. It uses a sequence of coarse approximations to reduce the computational cost in uncertainty quantification applications. The method is nowadays often considered…

This article reviews the application of advanced Monte Carlo techniques in the context of Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC). MLMC is a strategy employed to compute expectations which can be biased in some sense, for instance, by using the…