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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…
More than twenty years after its introduction, Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) remains one of the most effective methods for marginal likelihood estimation. It relies on a sequence of distributions interpolating between a tractable…
Importance sampling (IS) is a powerful Monte Carlo (MC) methodology for approximating integrals, for instance in the context of Bayesian inference. In IS, the samples are simulated from the so-called proposal distribution, and the choice of…
Variational inference is a powerful paradigm for approximate Bayesian inference with a number of appealing properties, including support for model learning and data subsampling. By contrast MCMC methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo do not…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) is a popular algorithm used to estimates the intractable marginal likelihood of deep generative models. Although AIS is guaranteed to provide unbiased estimate for any set of hyperparameters, the common…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) synthesizes weighted samples from an intractable distribution given its unnormalized density function. This algorithm relies on a sequence of interpolating distributions bridging the target to an initial…
We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…
Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method has been recognized as a powerful sampling tool in computational statistics. We show that performance of HMC can be significantly improved by incorporating importance sampling and an irreversible…
Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models (GPLVMs) have become increasingly popular for unsupervised tasks such as dimensionality reduction and missing data recovery due to their flexibility and non-linear nature. An importance-weighted…
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…
Probabilistic models in physics often require from the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn implies the computation of the partition function Z. Getting the exact value of Z, though, becomes a forbiddingly expensive…
In this paper we address the widely-experienced difficulty in tuning Hamiltonian-based Monte Carlo samplers. We develop an algorithm that allows for the adaptation of Hamiltonian and Riemann manifold Hamiltonian Monte Carlo samplers using…
This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) and related algorithms are highly effective tools for marginal likelihood estimation, but are not fully differentiable due to the use of Metropolis-Hastings correction steps. Differentiability is a…
Kernel methods have revolutionized the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. Their success, however, critically depends on the choice of kernel parameters. Using Gaussian process (GP) classification as a working example, this…
Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful and accurate method to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, HMC techniques are computationally demanding for Bayesian neural networks due to the high…
Sampling from a multimodal distribution is a fundamental and challenging problem in computational science and statistics. Among various approaches proposed for this task, one popular method is Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS). In this…