Related papers: Joint control variate for faster black-box variati…
Kinetic equations play a major rule in modeling large systems of interacting particles. Uncertainties may be due to various reasons, like lack of knowledge on the microscopic interaction details or incomplete informations at the boundaries.…
Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…
Policy gradient methods have demonstrated success in reinforcement learning tasks that have high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. However, policy gradient methods are also notoriously sample inefficient. This can be…
In the Monte Carlo (MC) method statistical noise is usually present. Statistical noise may become dominant in the calculation of a distribution, usually by iteration, but is less Important in calculating integrals. The subject of the…
It is well known that Monte Carlo integration with variance reduction by means of control variates can be implemented by the ordinary least squares estimator for the intercept in a multiple linear regression model. A central limit theorem…
We propose a variance reduction framework for variational inference using the Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method. Our framework is built on reparameterized gradient estimators and "recycles" parameters obtained from past update history in…
Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) is a recently proposed variation of Monte Carlo (MC) simulation that achieves variance reduction by simulating the governing equations on a series of spatial (or temporal) grids with increasing resolution.…
Many popular statistical models for complex phenomena are intractable, in the sense that the likelihood function cannot easily be evaluated. Bayesian estimation in this setting remains challenging, with a lack of computational methodology…
We introduce a method for non-uniform random number generation based on sampling a physical process in a controlled environment. We demonstrate one proof-of-concept implementation of the method that reduces the error of Monte Carlo…
Monte Carlo (MC) integration is an important calculational technique in the physical sciences. Practical considerations require that the calculations are performed as accurately as possible for a given set of computational resources. To…
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…
We overview a series of recent works devoted to variance reduction techniques for numerical stochastic homogenization. Numerical homogenization requires solving a set of problems at the micro scale, the so-called corrector problems. In a…
We present an unbiased numerical integration algorithm that handles both low-frequency regions and high frequency details of multidimensional integrals. It combines quadrature and Monte Carlo integration, by using a quadrature-base…
Bayesian inference for inverse problems involves computing expectations under posterior distributions -- e.g., posterior means, variances, or predictive quantities -- typically via Monte Carlo (MC) estimation. When the quantity of interest…
Stochastic gradient-based optimisation for discrete latent variable models is challenging due to the high variance of gradients. We introduce a variance reduction technique for score function estimators that makes use of double control…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…
In predictive modeling with simulation or machine learning, it is critical to accurately assess the quality of estimated values through output analysis. In recent decades output analysis has become enriched with methods that quantify the…
In this paper a novel modification of the multilevel Monte Carlo approach, allowing for further significant complexity reduction, is proposed. The idea of the modification is to use the method of control variates to reduce variance at level…
We propose a control variate multilevel Monte Carlo method for the kinetic BGK model of the Boltzmann equation subject to random inputs. The method combines a multilevel Monte Carlo technique with the computation of the optimal control…
We introduce a class of Monte Carlo estimators that aim to overcome the rapid growth of variance with dimension often observed for standard estimators by exploiting the target's independence structure. We identify the most basic…