Related papers: Annealed Importance Sampling with q-Paths
The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers.…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) and its Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) extensions are state-of-the-art methods for estimating normalizing constants of probability distributions. We propose here a novel Monte Carlo algorithm, Annealed Flow…
Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) can be used to model complex dynamical industrial systems. The counterpart of this modeling capability is their simulation cost, which makes reliability assessment untractable with standard…
In this paper we address the problem of performing Bayesian inference for the parameters of a nonlinear multi-output model and the covariance matrix of the different output signals. We propose an adaptive importance sampling (AIS) scheme…
We consider Bayesian inference by importance sampling when the likelihood is analytically intractable but can be unbiasedly estimated. We refer to this procedure as importance sampling squared (IS2), as we can often estimate the likelihood…
Given an unnormalized target distribution we want to obtain approximate samples from it and a tight lower bound on its (log) normalization constant log Z. Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) with Hamiltonian MCMC is a powerful method that…
Annealed importance sampling is a means to assign equilibrium weights to a nonequilibrium sample that was generated by a simulated annealing protocol. The weights may then be used to calculate equilibrium averages, and also serve as an…
Evaluating expectations on an Ising model (or Boltzmann machine) is essential for various applications, including statistical machine learning. However, in general, the evaluation is computationally difficult because it involves intractable…
In applications of Gaussian processes where quantification of uncertainty is a strict requirement, it is necessary to accurately characterize the posterior distribution over Gaussian process covariance parameters. Normally, this is done by…
Recent research has developed several Monte Carlo methods for estimating the normalization constant (partition function) based on the idea of annealing. This means sampling successively from a path of distributions that interpolate between…
The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS) algorithm is aimed at an optimal recycling of past simulations in an iterated importance sampling scheme. The difference with earlier adaptive importance sampling implementations like…
Ratios of normalizing constants for two distributions are needed in both Bayesian statistics, where they are used to compare models, and in statistical physics, where they correspond to differences in free energy. Two approaches have long…
Annealed Sequential Monte Carlo (ASMC) samplers are special cases of SMC samplers where the sequence of distributions can be embedded in a smooth path of distributions. Using this underlying path and a performance model based on the…
This note introduces a method for sampling Ising models with mixed boundary conditions. As an application of annealed importance sampling and the Swendsen-Wang algorithm, the method adopts a sequence of intermediate distributions that keeps…
Monte Carlo sampling methods are the standard procedure for approximating complicated integrals of multidimensional posterior distributions in Bayesian inference. In this work, we focus on the class of Layered Adaptive Importance Sampling…
Driven by applications in telecommunication networks, we explore the simulation task of estimating rare event probabilities for tandem queues in their steady state. Existing literature has recognized that importance sampling methods can be…
Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…
The Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is a deterministic approach to Bayesian inference on latent Gaussian models (LGMs) and focuses on fast and accurate approximation of posterior marginals for the parameters in the models.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is dominated by the cost of rollout generation, which has motivated the use of low-precision rollouts (e.g., FP8) paired with a BF16 trainer to improve throughput and reduce…
An essential problem in statistics and machine learning is the estimation of expectations involving PDFs with intractable normalizing constants. The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator, which normalizes the IS weights, has…