Related papers: Joint control variate for faster black-box variati…
Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is an approach for computing ground-state wavefunctions that has recently become more powerful due to the introduction of neural network-based wavefunction parametrizations. However, efficiently training neural…
Recent advances in machine learning have led to the development of new methods for enhancing Monte Carlo methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and importance sampling (IS). One such method is normalizing flows, which use a neural…
In this paper we present a novel approach towards variance reduction for discretised diffusion processes. The proposed approach involves specially constructed control variates and allows for a significant reduction in the variance for the…
We consider stochastic gradient estimation using only black-box function evaluations, where the function argument lies within a probability simplex. This problem is motivated from gradient-descent optimization procedures in multiple…
Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…
Neural control variates (NCVs) have emerged as a powerful tool for variance reduction in Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, particularly in high-dimensional problems where traditional control variates are difficult to construct analytically. By…
The task of estimating the gradient of a function in the presence of noise is central to several forms of reinforcement learning, including policy search methods. We present two techniques for reducing gradient estimation errors in the…
Learning in models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high variance gradient estimators. Generally, approaches have relied on control variates to reduce the variance of the REINFORCE estimator. Recent work (Jang et al.…
We develop the idea of using Monte Carlo sampling of random portfolios to solve portfolio investment problems. In this first paper we explore the need for more general optimization tools, and consider the means by which constrained random…
We consider quantile optimization of black-box functions that are estimated with noise. We propose two new iterative three-timescale local search algorithms. The first algorithm uses an appropriately modified finite-difference-based…
We introduce a bottleneck method for learning data representations based on information deficiency, rather than the more traditional information sufficiency. A variational upper bound allows us to implement this method efficiently. The…
Random features (RFs) are a popular technique to scale up kernel methods in machine learning, replacing exact kernel evaluations with stochastic Monte Carlo estimates. They underpin models as diverse as efficient transformers (by…
Computational color constancy is a preprocessing step used in many camera systems. The main aim is to discount the effect of the illumination on the colors in the scene and restore the original colors of the objects. Recently, several deep…
Monte Carlo criticality simulations are widely used in nuclear safety demonstrations, as they offer an arbitrarily precise estimation of global and local tallies while making very few assumptions. However, since the inception of such…
Many data-science applications involve detecting a shared signal between two high-dimensional variables. Using random matrix theory methods, we determine when such signal can be detected and reconstructed from sample correlations, despite…
In this paper we examine a control variate estimator for a quantity that can be expressed as the expectation of a functional of a random process, that is itself the solution of a differential equation driven by fast mean-reverting ergodic…
We propose a method to mitigate heavy-tailed distributions in fermion Quantum Monte Carlo simulations originating from zeros of the fermion determinant. In this case the second moment of the observables might be not well defined, and we…
Adjoint methods form a class of importance sampling methods that are used to accelerate Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of transport equations. Ideally, adjoint methods allow for zero-variance MC estimators provided that the solution to an…
This paper presents a method to leverage arbitrary neural network architecture for control variates. Control variates are crucial in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo integration, but they hinge on finding a function that both correlates…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo are state-of-the-art methods for taking samples from high-dimensional distributions with a differentiable density function. To generate samples, they numerically integrate…