Related papers: Joint control variate for faster black-box variati…
A general methodology is introduced for the construction and effective application of control variates to estimation problems involving data from reversible MCMC samplers. We propose the use of a specific class of functions as control…
Approximate inference in complex probabilistic models such as deep Gaussian processes requires the optimisation of doubly stochastic objective functions. These objectives incorporate randomness both from mini-batch subsampling of the data…
While generally considered computationally expensive, Uncertainty Quantification using Monte Carlo sampling remains beneficial for applications with uncertainties of high dimension. As an extension of the naive Monte Carlo method, the…
This paper presents a control variate-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for efficient sampling from the probability simplex, with a focus on applications in large-scale Bayesian models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. Standard…
In this paper, we extend a recently introduced multi-fidelity control variate for the uncertainty quantification of the Boltzmann equation to the case of kinetic models arising in the study of multiagent systems. For these phenomena, where…
Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradient estimates. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have…
Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a powerful and fast-growing method for optimizing and evolving parameterized many-body wave functions, especially with modern neural-network quantum states. In practice, however, the stochastic estimators…
We train a pair of autoregressive models to construct zero-mean control variates to mitigate the sign problem in quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The two autoregressive networks are confined to the positive- and negative-sign sectors with…
We introduce a new class of Monte Carlo based approximations of expectations of random variables such that their laws are only available via certain discretizations. Sampling from the discretized versions of these laws can typically…
The control variates (CV) method is widely used in policy gradient estimation to reduce the variance of the gradient estimators in practice. A control variate is applied by subtracting a baseline function from the state-action value…
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a…
The recent growth in multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification has given rise to a large set of variance reduction techniques that leverage information from model ensembles to provide variance reduction for estimates of the statistics of a…
The Multilevel Monte Carlo method is an efficient variance reduction technique. It uses a sequence of coarse approximations to reduce the computational cost in uncertainty quantification applications. The method is nowadays often considered…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
The Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method has been applied successfully in a wide range of settings since its first introduction by Giles (2008). When using only two levels, the method can be viewed as a kind of control-variate approach to…
We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
In multiple importance sampling we combine samples from a finite list of proposal distributions. When those proposal distributions are used to create control variates, it is possible (Owen and Zhou, 2000) to bound the ratio of the resulting…
Bayesian model comparison relies upon the model evidence, yet for many models of interest the model evidence is unavailable in closed form and must be approximated. Many of the estimators for evidence that have been proposed in the Monte…
We study control variate methods for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in the setting of deterministic sweep sampling using $K\geq 2$ transition kernels. New variance reduction results are provided for MCMC averages based on sweeps over…