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As it has become common to use many computer cores in routine applications, finding good ways to parallelize popular algorithms has become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme for Markov chain Monte…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-06-01 Guillaume W. Basse , Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Makram Chahine , T. Konstantin Rusch , Zach J. Patterson , Daniela Rus

We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-05 Mikkel B. Lykkegaard , Tim J. Dodwell , Colin Fox , Grigorios Mingas , Robert Scheichl

Parallel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (pMCMC) algorithms generate clouds of proposals at each step to efficiently resolve a target probability distribution. We build a rigorous foundational framework for pMCMC algorithms that situates these…

We construct a new framework for accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo in posterior sampling problems where standard methods are limited by the computational cost of the likelihood, or of numerical models embedded therein. Our approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-01-06 Patrick R. Conrad , Youssef M. Marzouk , Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith

Many recent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers leverage continuous dynamics to define a transition kernel that efficiently explores a target distribution. In tandem, a focus has been on devising scalable variants that subsample the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-11-03 Yi-An Ma , Tianqi Chen , Emily B. Fox

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most powerful methods to sample from a given probability distribution, of which the Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) is a variant wherein the gradient of the distribution is used…

Applications · Statistics 2022-01-21 Mariya Mamajiwala , Debasish Roy , Serge Guillas

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are popular when considering sampling from a high-dimensional random variable $\mathbf{x}$ with possibly unnormalised probability density $p$ and observed data $\mathbf{d}$. However, MCMC requires…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-11 Haoyun Ying , Keheng Mao , Klaus Mosegaard

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-17 Yura N Perov , Tuan Anh Le , Frank Wood

We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-01-14 Emilia Pompe , Chris Holmes , Krzysztof Łatuszyński

Efficiently sampling from un-normalized target distributions is a fundamental problem in scientific computing and machine learning. Traditional approaches such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) guarantee asymptotically unbiased samples…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-06 Weijian Luo , Boya Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 James Cuin , Davide Carbone , Yanbo Tang , O. Deniz Akyildiz

We consider parallel asynchronous Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for problems where we can leverage (stochastic) gradients to define continuous dynamics which explore the target distribution. We outline a solution strategy for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-12-09 Jost Tobias Springenberg , Aaron Klein , Stefan Falkner , Frank Hutter

Motivated by the physics of strings and branes, we develop a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms involving extended objects. Starting from a collection of parallel Metropolis-Hastings (MH) samplers, we place them on an…

Computational Physics · Physics 2017-09-13 Jonathan J. Heckman , Jeffrey G. Bernstein , Ben Vigoda

We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-23 Yi-An Ma , Niladri Chatterji , Xiang Cheng , Nicolas Flammarion , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

Calculating averages with respect to multimodal probability distributions is often necessary in applications. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to this end, which are based on time averages along a realization of a Markov process…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-24 M. Chak , T. Lelièvre , G. Stoltz , U. Vaes

We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…

Computation · Statistics 2015-09-14 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-14 Xunpeng Huang , Hanze Dong , Yifan Hao , Yi-An Ma , Tong Zhang

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…

Computation · Statistics 2012-05-03 Murali Haran , Luke Tierney