Related papers: Joint control variate for faster black-box variati…
We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over some random variable or a finite sum. We propose a stochastic…
Continued demand for accurate and computationally efficient transport methods to solve optically thick, fixed-source transport problems has inspired research on variance-reduction (VR) techniques for Monte Carlo (MC). Methods that use…
Control variates have become an increasingly popular variance-reduction technique in Bayesian inference. Many broadly applicable control variates are based on the Langevin-Stein operator, which leverages gradient information from any…
Mixture variational distributions in black box variational inference (BBVI) have demonstrated impressive results in challenging density estimation tasks. However, currently scaling the number of mixture components can lead to a linear…
To recover a low rank structure from a noisy matrix, truncated singular value decomposition has been extensively used and studied. Recent studies suggested that the signal can be better estimated by shrinking the singular values. We pursue…
High statistical precision is critical for Monte Carlo (MC) samples in high energy physics and is degraded by negatively weighted events. This paper investigates a procedure to learn the relationship between the negative and positive weight…
Monte Carlo integration becomes prohibitively expensive when each sample requires a high-fidelity model evaluation. Multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification methods mitigate this by combining estimators from high- and low-fidelity models,…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
Recent research has seen several advances relevant to black-box VI, but the current state of automatic posterior inference is unclear. One such advance is the use of normalizing flows to define flexible posterior densities for deep latent…
This article addresses online variational estimation in parametric state-space models. We propose a new procedure for efficiently computing the evidence lower bound and its gradient in a streaming-data setting, where observations arrive…
Many machine learning problems optimize an objective that must be measured with noise. The primary method is a first order stochastic gradient descent using one or more Monte Carlo (MC) samples at each step. There are settings where…
Quantum mechanics for many-body systems may be reduced to the evaluation of integrals in 3N dimensions using Monte-Carlo, providing the Quantum Monte Carlo ab initio methods. Here we limit ourselves to expectation values for trial…
In Monte Carlo calculations of expectation values in lattice quantum field theories, the stochastic variance of the sampling procedure that is used defines the precision of the calculation for a fixed number of samples. If the variance of…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to reduce the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by an appropriate change of measure. In this work, we study importance sam- pling in the framework of diffusion process and consider the change…
In stochastic simulation, input uncertainty refers to the output variability arising from the statistical noise in specifying the input models. This uncertainty can be measured by a variance contribution in the output, which, in the…
Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…
In robust optimisation problems the objective function consists of an average over (an ensemble of) uncertain parameters. Ensemble optimisation (EnOpt) implements steepest descent by estimating the gradient using linear regression on…
Excess noise is a major obstacle to high-performance continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD), which is mainly derived from the amplitude attenuation and phase fluctuation of quantum signals caused by channel instability. Here,…
A Monte Carlo method to optimize cuts on variables is presented and evaluated. The method gives a much higher signal to noise ratio than does a manual choice of cuts.
Monte Carlo sampling techniques have broad applications in machine learning, Bayesian posterior inference, and parameter estimation. Often the target distribution takes the form of a product distribution over a dataset with a large number…