Related papers: Gradient estimators for normalising flows
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an…
A novel class of non-reversible Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes relying on continuous-time piecewise-deterministic Markov Processes has recently emerged. In these algorithms, the state of the Markov process evolves according to a…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms are popular samplers for approximate inference, but they are generally biased. We show that many recent versions of these methods (e.g. Chen et al. (2014)) cannot be corrected using…
We propose Kernel Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (KMC), a gradient-free adaptive MCMC algorithm based on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). On target densities where classical HMC is not an option due to intractable gradients, KMC adaptively learns…
Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…
In the last few decades, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been widely applied to Bayesian updating of structural dynamic models in the field of structural health monitoring. Recently, several MCMC algorithms have been developed…
Accurate estimates of long-term risk probabilities and their gradients are critical for many stochastic safe control methods. However, computing such risk probabilities in real-time and in unseen or changing environments is challenging.…
Sampling from unnormalised discrete distributions is a fundamental problem across various domains. While Markov chain Monte Carlo offers a principled approach, it often suffers from slow mixing and poor convergence. In this paper, we…
We propose a class of discrete state sampling algorithms based on Nesterov's accelerated gradient method, which extends the classical Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm. The evolution of the discrete states probability distribution governed…
In plasma edge simulations, kinetic Monte Carlo (MC) is often used to simulate neutral particles and estimate source terms. For large-sized reactors, like ITER and DEMO, high particle collision rates lead to a substantial computational cost…
The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a promising framework for modeling predictive uncertainty and enhancing out-of-distribution robustness (OOD) by estimating the posterior distribution of network parameters. Stochastic Gradient Markov…
Replica exchange Monte Carlo (reMC), also known as parallel tempering, is an important technique for accelerating the convergence of the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. However, such a method requires the evaluation…
We introduce Projected Latent Markov Chain Monte Carlo (PL-MCMC), a technique for sampling from the high-dimensional conditional distributions learned by a normalizing flow. We prove that a Metropolis-Hastings implementation of PL-MCMC…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
This study proposes a trainable sampling-based solver for combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) using a deep-learning technique called deep unfolding. The proposed solver is based on the Ohzeki method that combines Markov-chain…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that generates proposals for a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm by simulating the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system. However, HMC is sensitive to large time…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach that exhibits favourable exploration properties in high-dimensional models such as neural networks. Unfortunately, HMC has limited use in large-data regimes and…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient techniques have made it possible to estimate posterior distributions from large datasets via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). However, when the target posterior is multimodal, mixing performance is…