Related papers: MCMC-driven importance samplers

Bayesian inference promises to ground and improve the performance of deep neural networks. It promises to be robust to overfitting, to simplify the training procedure and the space of hyperparameters, and to provide a calibrated measure of…

Atomistic simulations provide valuable insights into the physical processes governing material behavior. However, their applicability is fundamentally constrained by the limited time scales accessible to brute-force simulations. This…

Sequential optimization methods are often confronted with the curse of dimensionality in high-dimensional spaces. Current approaches under the Gaussian process framework are still burdened by the computational complexity of tracking…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), such as Langevin dynamics, is valid for approximating intractable distributions. However, its usage is limited in the context of deep latent variable models owing to costly datapoint-wise sampling iterations…

Many scientific and engineering problems require to perform Bayesian inferences in function spaces, in which the unknowns are of infinite dimension. In such problems, many standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms become arbitrary…

Latent Space (LS) network models project the nodes of a network on a $d$-dimensional latent space to achieve dimensionality reduction of the network while preserving its relevant features. Inference is often carried out within a Markov…

Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a popular technique in Bayesian statistical modeling. They have long been used to obtain samples from posterior distributions, but recent research has focused on the scalability of these…

Multi-sample, importance-weighted variational autoencoders (IWAE) give tighter bounds and more accurate uncertainty estimates than variational autoencoders (VAE) trained with a standard single-sample objective. However, IWAEs scale poorly:…

Multilevel models (MLMs) are a central building block of the Bayesian workflow. They enable joint, interpretable modeling of data across hierarchical levels and provide a fully probabilistic quantification of uncertainty. Despite their…

We propose an importance sampling (IS)-based transport map Hamiltonian Monte Carlo procedure for performing full Bayesian analysis in general nonlinear high-dimensional hierarchical models. Using IS techniques to construct a transport map,…

High-dimensional feature selection arises in many areas of modern science. For example, in genomic research we want to find the genes that can be used to separate tissues of different classes (e.g. cancer and normal) from tens of thousands…

We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…

Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…

This book aims to provide a graduate-level introduction to advanced topics in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, as applied broadly in the Bayesian computational context. Most, if not all of these topics (stochastic gradient MCMC,…

We show that the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator that is importance sampled from an exponential family is a convex function of the natural parameter of the distribution. With this insight, we propose an adaptive importance sampling…

Poisson log-linear models are ubiquitous in many applications, and one of the most popular approaches for parametric count regression. In the Bayesian context, however, there are no sufficient specific computational tools for efficient…

Computation of extreme quantiles and tail-based risk measures using standard Monte Carlo simulation can be inefficient. A method to speed up computations is provided by importance sampling. We show that importance sampling algorithms,…

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as powerful image priors in Bayesian computational imaging. Two primary strategies have been proposed for leveraging DMs in this context: Plug-and-Play methods, which are zero-shot and highly flexible but…