Related papers: Hopping between distant basins
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) methods seek to find global optima of objective functions which are only available as a black-box or are expensive to evaluate. Such methods construct a surrogate model for the objective function, quantifying the…
Stochastic variational inference allows for fast posterior inference in complex Bayesian models. However, the algorithm is prone to local optima which can make the quality of the posterior approximation sensitive to the choice of…
This paper presents a new methodology to craft navigation functions for nonlinear systems with stochastic uncertainty. The method relies on the transformation of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation into a linear partial differential…
Recently a majorization method for optimizing partition functions of log-linear models was proposed alongside a novel quadratic variational upper-bound. In the batch setting, it outperformed state-of-the-art first- and second-order…
Selection HHs are randomised search methodologies which choose and execute heuristics during the optimisation process from a set of low-level heuristics. A machine learning mechanism is generally used to decide which low-level heuristic…
We consider the learning of multi-agent Hawkes processes, a model containing multiple Hawkes processes with shared endogenous impact functions and different exogenous intensities. In the framework of stochastic maximum likelihood…
The Hawkes process (HP) has been widely applied to modeling self-exciting events including neuron spikes, earthquakes and tweets. To avoid designing parametric triggering kernel and to be able to quantify the prediction confidence, the…
Herding is a deterministic algorithm used to generate data points that can be regarded as random samples satisfying input moment conditions. The algorithm is based on the complex behavior of a high-dimensional dynamical system and is…
We introduce a variant of the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm to address large-deviation statistics in stochastic hydrodynamics. Based on the path-integral approach to stochastic (partial) differential equations, our HMC algorithm…
Faced with massive data, subsampling is a commonly used technique to improve computational efficiency, and using nonuniform subsampling probabilities is an effective approach to improve estimation efficiency. For computational efficiency,…
The prevalence of variational methods in near-term quantum computing makes optimizer choice critical, yet selection is frequently intuition-based. We therefore present a systematic benchmark of eight classical optimization algorithms for…
Stochastic hydrodynamics provides a dynamical framework for the evolution of fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions, but poses significant challenges in numerical simulations. We present an algorithm for the simulation of non-relativistic…
Continuous-time approximation of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a crucial tool to study its escaping behaviors from stationary points. However, existing stochastic differential equation (SDE) models fail to fully capture these…
This work introduces the StoMADS-PB algorithm for constrained stochastic blackbox optimization, which is an extension of the mesh adaptive direct-search (MADS) method originally developed for deterministic blackbox optimization under…
We examine the use of different randomisation policies for stochastic gradient algorithms used in sampling, based on first-order (or overdamped) Langevin dynamics, the most popular of which is known as Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics.…
The widespread adoption of randomized controlled trials (A/B Tests) for decision-making has introduced a pervasive "Winner's Curse": experiments selected for launch often exhibit upwardly biased effect estimates and invalid confidence…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum, also known as Stochastic Heavy Ball method (SHB), is one of the most popular algorithms for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems in various machine learning tasks. In practical…
We propose a sampling-based trajectory optimization methodology for constrained problems. We extend recent works on stochastic search to deal with box control constraints,as well as nonlinear state constraints for discrete dynamical…
Bifurcations mark qualitative changes of long-term behavior in dynamical systems and can often signal sudden ("hard") transitions or catastrophic events (divergences). Accurately locating them is critical not just for deeper understanding…
We develop lagged Metropolis-Hastings walk for sampling from simple undirected graphs according to given stationary sampling probabilities. We explain how to apply the technique together with designed graphs for sampling of units-in-space.…