Related papers: On the Optimization of Approximate Control Variate…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
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…
A general methodology is introduced for the construction and effective application of control variates to estimation problems involving data from reversible MCMC samplers. We propose the use of a specific class of functions as control…
This paper studies the multilevel Monte-Carlo estimator for the expectation of a maximum of conditional expectations. This problem arises naturally when considering many stress tests and appears in the calculation of the interest rate…
This paper studies the optimal control problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems and an approximate dynamic programming-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme is proposed for minimizing a quadratic performance measure. In the…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are popular likelihood-based generative models which can be efficiently trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). There has been much progress in improving the expressiveness of the variational…
This work addresses uncertainty quantification of electromagnetic devices determined by the eddy current problem. The multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method is used for the treatment of uncertain parameters while the devices are discretized…
Continuous level Monte Carlo is an unbiased, continuous version of the celebrated multilevel Monte Carlo method. The approximation level is assumed to be continuous resulting in a stochastic process describing the quantity of interest.…
We present an adaptive multilevel Monte Carlo (AMLMC) algorithm for approximating deterministic, real-valued, bounded linear functionals that depend on the solution of a linear elliptic PDE with a lognormal diffusivity coefficient and…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…
Interest is in evaluating, by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation, the expected value of a function with respect to a, possibly unnormalized, probability distribution. A general purpose variance reduction technique for the MCMC…
Autocovariances are a fundamental quantity of interest in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations with autocorrelation function (ACF) plots being an integral visualization tool for performance assessment. Unfortunately, for slow-mixing…
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…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are one of the most popular classes of algorithms for sampling from a target probability distribution. A rising trend in recent years consists in analyzing the convergence of MCMC algorithms using…
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…
We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…
Neural network parametrizations have increasingly been used to represent the ground and excited states in variational Monte Carlo (VMC) with promising results. However, traditional VMC methods only optimize the wave function in regions of…
Control variates are variance reduction tools for Monte Carlo estimators. They can provide significant variance reduction, but usually require a large number of samples, which can be prohibitive when sampling or evaluating the integrand is…
Control variates are a well-established tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators. However, for large-scale problems including high-dimensional and large-sample settings, their advantages can be outweighed by a substantial…
This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in…