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Importance sampling is widely used to improve the efficiency of deep neural network (DNN) training by reducing the variance of gradient estimators. However, efficiently assessing the variance reduction relative to uniform sampling remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Takuro Kutsuna

Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) seeks experiments that maximize the expected information gain (EIG) in model parameters. Directly estimating the EIG using nested Monte Carlo is computationally expensive and requires an explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Jiayuan Dong , Christian Jacobsen , Mehdi Khalloufi , Maryam Akram , Wanjiao Liu , Karthik Duraisamy , Xun Huan

We propose a relative entropy gradient sampler (REGS) for sampling from unnormalized distributions. REGS is a particle method that seeks a sequence of simple nonlinear transforms iteratively pushing the initial samples from a reference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-07 Xingdong Feng , Yuan Gao , Jian Huang , Yuling Jiao , Xu Liu

Estimating the parameters of mathematical models is a common problem in almost all branches of science. However, this problem can prove notably difficult when processes and model descriptions become increasingly complex and an explicit…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-09 Stefan T. Radev , Ulf K. Mertens , Andreas Voss , Lynton Ardizzone , Ullrich Köthe

A rare event is defined by a low probability of occurrence. Accurate estimation of such small probabilities is of utmost importance across diverse domains. Conventional Monte Carlo methods are inefficient, demanding an exorbitant number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zhenggqi Gao , Dinghuai Zhang , Luca Daniel , Duane S. Boning

Normalizing flows are flexible, parameterized distributions that can be used to approximate expectations from intractable distributions via importance sampling. However, current flow-based approaches are limited on challenging targets where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Laurence Illing Midgley , Vincent Stimper , Gregor N. C. Simm , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Normalizing Flows are a promising new class of algorithms for unsupervised learning based on maximum likelihood optimization with change of variables. They offer to learn a factorized component representation for complex nonlinear data and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Reuben Feinman , Nikhil Parthasarathy

Estimating the expectation of a real-valued function of a random variable from sample data is a critical aspect of statistical analysis, with far-reaching implications in various applications. Current methodologies typically assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Paweł Lorek , Rafał Nowak , Rafał Topolnicki , Tomasz Trzciński , Maciej Zięba , Aleksandra Krystecka

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Hao Wu , Jonas Köhler , Frank Noé

Flow matching models effectively represent complex distributions, yet estimating expectations of functions of their outputs remains challenging under limited sampling budgets. Independent sampling often yields high-variance estimates,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xinshuang Liu , Runfa Blark Li , Shaoxiu Wei , Truong Nguyen

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-11 Shirin Goshtasbpour , Fernando Perez-Cruz

Modeling stochastic dynamics from discrete observations is a key interdisciplinary challenge. Existing methods often fail to estimate the continuous evolution of probability densities from trajectories or face the curse of dimensionality.…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruikun Li , Jiazhen Liu , Huandong Wang , Qingmin Liao , Yong Li

Deterministic neural networks (NNs) are increasingly being deployed in safety critical domains, where calibrated, robust, and efficient measures of uncertainty are crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel method for training non-Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Alexander Amini , Wilko Schwarting , Ava Soleimany , Daniela Rus

Decentralized optimization is critical for solving large-scale machine learning problems over distributed networks, where multiple nodes collaborate through local communication. In practice, the variances of stochastic gradient estimators…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-13 Hongxu Chen , Ke Wei , Luo Luo

Neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) provide expressive representations of invertible transport maps that can be used to approximate complex probability distributions, e.g., for generative modeling, density estimation, and Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Youssef Marzouk , Zhi Ren , Jakob Zech

Ratios of normalizing constants for two distributions are needed in both Bayesian statistics, where they are used to compare models, and in statistical physics, where they correspond to differences in free energy. Two approaches have long…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Radford M. Neal

Existing machine learning methods for causal inference usually estimate quantities expressed via the mean of potential outcomes (e.g., average treatment effect). However, such quantities do not capture the full information about the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Valentyn Melnychuk , Dennis Frauen , Stefan Feuerriegel

Sampling from unnormalized densities presents a fundamental challenge with wide-ranging applications, from posterior inference to molecular dynamics simulations. Continuous flow-based neural samplers offer a promising approach, learning a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Wuhao Chen , Zijing Ou , Yingzhen Li

Many contemporary machine learning models require extensive tuning of hyperparameters to perform well. A variety of methods, such as Bayesian optimization, have been developed to automate and expedite this process. However, tuning remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Setareh Ariafar , Zelda Mariet , Ehsan Elhamifar , Dana Brooks , Jennifer Dy , Jasper Snoek

Distribution alignment has many applications in deep learning, including domain adaptation and unsupervised image-to-image translation. Most prior work on unsupervised distribution alignment relies either on minimizing simple non-parametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Ben Usman , Avneesh Sud , Nick Dufour , Kate Saenko