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Related papers: Parallel Tempering With a Variational Reference

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While gradient-based discrete samplers are effective in sampling from complex distributions, they are susceptible to getting trapped in local minima, particularly in high-dimensional, multimodal discrete distributions, owing to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Luxu Liang , Yuhang Jia , Feng Zhou

Modern problems in astronomical Bayesian inference require efficient methods for sampling from complex, high-dimensional, often multi-modal probability distributions. Most popular methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, perform…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2016-03-16 Will Vousden , Will M. Farr , Ilya Mandel

In this paper we develop a new general Bayesian methodology that simultaneously estimates parameters of interest and the marginal likelihood of the model. The proposed methodology builds on Simulated Tempering, which is a powerful algorithm…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-03 Biljana Jonoska Stojkova , David A. Campbell

Density tempering (also called density annealing) is a sequential Monte Carlo approach to Bayesian inference for general state models; it is an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. When applied to state space models, it moves a…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-05 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , Minh Ngoc Tran

Bayesian inference in hidden Markov models (HMMs) can be challenging due to the presence of multimodality in the likelihood function, and consequently in the joint posterior distribution, even after correcting for label switching. The…

Applications · Statistics 2026-05-01 Marco A. Gallegos-Herrada , Vianey Leos-Barajas , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Bayesian methods feature useful properties for solving inverse problems, such as tomographic reconstruction. The prior distribution introduces regularization, which helps solving the ill-posed problem and reduces overfitting. In practice,…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-12-02 Max-Heinrich Laves , Malte Tölle , Alexander Schlaefer , Sandy Engelhardt

The P\'olya tree (PT) process is a general-purpose Bayesian nonparametric model that has found wide application in a range of inference problems. It has a simple analytic form and the posterior computation boils down to beta-binomial…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-09 Naoki Awaya , Li Ma

New sampling algorithms based on simulating continuous-time stochastic processes called piece-wise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) have shown considerable promise. However, these methods can struggle to sample from multi-modal or…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-31 Matthew Sutton , Robert Salomone , Augustin Chevallier , Paul Fearnhead

Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference over large data sets, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Stephan Mandt , James McInerney , Farhan Abrol , Rajesh Ranganath , David Blei

Datasets displaying temporal dependencies abound in science and engineering applications, with Markov models representing a simplified and popular view of the temporal dependence structure. In this paper, we consider Bayesian settings that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-27 Imon Banerjee , Vinayak A. Rao , Harsha Honnappa

The study of animal behavioural states inferred through hidden Markov models and similar state switching models has seen a significant increase in popularity in recent years. The ability to account for varying levels of behavioural scale…

Computation · Statistics 2021-05-06 Giada Sacchi , Ben Swallow

The theoretical information threshold for the planted clique problem is $2\log_2(N)$, however no polynomial algorithm is known to recover a planted clique of size $O(N^{1/2-\epsilon})$, $\epsilon>0$. In this paper we will apply a standard…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2019-01-09 Maria Chiara Angelini

Transition path theory (TPT) for diffusion processes is a framework for analysing the transitions of multiscale ergodic diffusion processes between disjoint metastable subsets of state space. Most methods for applying TPT involve the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-03-31 Nada Cvetković , Tim Conrad , Han Cheng Lie

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are frequently used to approximately simulate high-dimensional, multimodal probability distributions. In adaptive MCMC methods, the transition kernel is changed "on the fly" in the hope to speed up…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-06-04 Winfried Barta

Integration over non-negative integrands is a central problem in machine learning (e.g. for model averaging, (hyper-)parameter marginalisation, and computing posterior predictive distributions). Bayesian Quadrature is a probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-05 Ed Wagstaff , Saad Hamid , Michael Osborne

We give conditions under which a Markov chain constructed via parallel or simulated tempering is guaranteed to be rapidly mixing, which are applicable to a wide range of multimodal distributions arising in Bayesian statistical inference and…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-06-15 Dawn B. Woodard , Scott C. Schmidler , Mark Huber

We propose a parallel adaptive constraint-tightening approach to solve a linear model predictive control problem for discrete-time systems, based on inexact numerical optimization algorithms and operator splitting methods. The underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-24 Laura Ferranti , Tamas Keviczky

In this paper we demonstrate that tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers for Bayesian models by recursively subsampling observations without replacement can improve the performance of baseline samplers in terms of effective sample size…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-01-29 Jan-Willem van de Meent , Brooks Paige , Frank Wood

Performing Bayesian inference on large spatio-temporal models requires extracting inverse elements of large sparse precision matrices for marginal variances, as well as estimating model hyperparameters. Although direct matrix factorizations…

Computation · Statistics 2026-03-17 Abylay Zhumekenov , Elias T. Krainski , Håvard Rue

Foundation models have impressive performance and generalization capabilities across a wide range of applications. The increasing size of the models introduces great challenges for the training. Tensor parallelism is a critical technique…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2023-01-23 Shenggan Cheng , Ziming Liu , Jiangsu Du , Yang You