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Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-05-12 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-29 Chris J. Oates , Jon Cockayne , François-Xavier Briol , Mark Girolami

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is a popular class of algorithms for scalable Bayesian inference. However, these algorithms include hyperparameters such as step size or batch size that influence the accuracy of…

Computation · Statistics 2021-11-19 Jeremie Coullon , Leah South , Christopher Nemeth

Recent advances in MCMC use normalizing flows to precondition target distributions and enable jumps to distant regions. However, there is currently no systematic comparison of different normalizing flow architectures for MCMC. As such, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 David Nabergoj , Erik Štrumbelj

The recent introduction of machine learning techniques, especially normalizing flows, for the sampling of lattice gauge theories has shed some hope on improving the sampling efficiency of the traditional HMC algorithm. Naive use of…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2022-12-06 David Albandea , Luigi Del Debbio , Pilar Hernández , Richard Kenway , Joe Marsh Rossney , Alberto Ramos

We study stochastic gradient descent for solving conditional stochastic optimization problems, in which an objective to be minimized is given by a parametric nested expectation with an outer expectation taken with respect to one random…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-04-28 Takashi Goda , Wataru Kitade

In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-06 John Schulman , Nicolas Heess , Theophane Weber , Pieter Abbeel

We examine the zero-temperature Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm as a tool for training a neural network by minimizing a loss function. We find that, as expected on theoretical grounds and shown empirically by other authors, Metropolis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Stephen Whitelam , Viktor Selin , Ian Benlolo , Corneel Casert , Isaac Tamblyn

Bayesian deep learning offers a principled way to address many issues concerning safety of artificial intelligence (AI), such as model uncertainty,model interpretability, and prediction bias. However, due to the lack of efficient Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-22 Sehwan Kim , Qifan Song , Faming Liang

Recent papers have demonstrated the possibility of energy-based text generation by adapting gradient-based sampling algorithms, a paradigm of MCMC algorithms that promises fast convergence. However, as we show in this paper, previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Li Du , Afra Amini , Lucas Torroba Hennigen , Xinyan Velocity Yu , Jason Eisner , Holden Lee , Ryan Cotterell

In this paper, we investigate the use of multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods for estimating the expectation of discretized random fields. Specifically, we consider a setting in which the input and output vectors of numerical simulators…

Boltzmann Generators have emerged as a promising machine learning tool for generating samples from equilibrium distributions of molecular systems using Normalizing Flows and importance weighting. Recently, Flow Matching has helped speed up…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Lorenz Vaitl , Leon Klein

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Antonios Alexos , Alex Boyd , Stephan Mandt

We present a method for optimizing the location of the fermion ground-state nodes using a combination of diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) and projected gradient descent (PGD). A PGD iteration shifts the parameters of an arbitrary node-fixing…

Computational Physics · Physics 2022-04-06 John McFarland , Efstratios Manousakis

Optimization with noisy gradients has become ubiquitous in statistics and machine learning. Reparameterization gradients, or gradient estimates computed via the "reparameterization trick," represent a class of noisy gradients often used in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-23 Andrew C. Miller , Nicholas J. Foti , Alexander D'Amour , Ryan P. Adams

The recent introduction of Machine Learning techniques, especially Normalizing Flows, for the sampling of lattice gauge theories has shed some hope on improving the sampling efficiency of the traditional Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm.…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2023-09-21 David Albandea , Luigi Del Debbio , Pilar Hernández , Richard Kenway , Joe Marsh Rossney , Alberto Ramos

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-30 Changyou Chen , Ruiyi Zhang

Implicit models, which allow for the generation of samples but not for point-wise evaluation of probabilities, are omnipresent in real-world problems tackled by machine learning and a hot topic of current research. Some examples include…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-27 Yingzhen Li , Richard E. Turner

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are often used for approximate inference inside learning, but their slow mixing can be difficult to diagnose and the approximations can seriously degrade learning. To alleviate these issues, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-25 Jacob Steinhardt , Percy Liang

This paper is concerned about a learning algorithm for a probabilistic model of spiking neural networks (SNNs). Jimenez Rezende & Gerstner (2014) proposed a stochastic variational inference algorithm to train SNNs with hidden neurons. The…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Hiroshi Kajino