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Related papers: Gradient-based Adaptive Importance Samplers

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This work proposes a novel method through which local information about the target density can be used to construct an efficient importance sampler. The backbone of the proposed method is the Incremental Mixture Importance Sampling (IMIS)…

Computation · Statistics 2016-11-22 Matteo Fasiolo , Flávio Eler de Melo , Simon Maskell

Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-07-21 Zhijian He , Zhan Zheng , Xiaoqun Wang

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Importance sampling (IS) as an elegant and efficient variance reduction (VR) technique for the acceleration of stochastic optimization problems has attracted many researches recently. Unlike commonly adopted stochastic uniform sampling in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Fei Wang , Xiaofeng Gao , Guihai Chen , Jun Ye

Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Luis E. Ortiz , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

Iterated sampling importance resampling (i-SIR) is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm which is based on $N$ independent proposals. As $N$ grows, its samples become nearly independent, but with an increased computational cost. We…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-24 Pietari Laitinen , Matti Vihola

In this work, we introduce a novel class of adaptive Monte Carlo methods, called adaptive independent sticky MCMC algorithms, for efficient sampling from a generic target probability density function (pdf). The new class of algorithms…

Computation · Statistics 2025-04-09 L. Martino , R. Casarin , F. Leisen , D. Luengo

Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Jun Han

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo technique for efficiently estimating the likelihood of rare events by biasing the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By drawing weighted samples from a learned proposal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Liam A. Kruse , Marc R. Schlichting , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models is constrained by substantial GPU memory requirements. Low-rank adaptation methods mitigate this challenge by updating only a subset of parameters. However, these approaches often limit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Kaiyuan Tian , Yu Tang , Gongqingjian Jiang , Baihui Liu , Yifu Gao , Xialin Su , Linbo Qiao , Dongsheng Li

In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-23 Shengyi He , Guangxin Jiang , Henry Lam , Michael C. Fu

We consider Particle Gibbs (PG) as a tool for Bayesian analysis of non-linear non-Gaussian state-space models. PG is a Monte Carlo (MC) approximation of the standard Gibbs procedure which uses sequential MC (SMC) importance sampling inside…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-18 Oliver Grothe , Tore Selland Kleppe , Roman Liesenfeld

Efficiently sampling from high-dimensional, multi-modal posteriors is a central challenge in Bayesian inference for astrophysics, especially gravitational-wave astronomy. Popular families of methods like Markov-chain Monte Carlo, nested…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2026-03-26 Miaoxin Liu , Alvin J. K. Chua

This paper introduces Tree-Pyramidal Adaptive Importance Sampling (TP-AIS), a novel iterated sampling method that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches like deterministic mixture population Monte Carlo (DM-PMC), mixture population Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-25 Javier Felip , Nilesh Ahuja , Omesh Tickoo

We introduce a new Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler called the Markov Interacting Importance Sampler (MIIS). The MIIS sampler uses conditional importance sampling (IS) approximations to jointly sample the current state of the Markov…

Computation · Statistics 2015-06-26 Eduardo F. Mendes , Marcel Scharth , Robert Kohn

An essential problem in statistics and machine learning is the estimation of expectations involving PDFs with intractable normalizing constants. The self-normalized importance sampling (SNIS) estimator, which normalizes the IS weights, has…

Computation · Statistics 2024-07-01 Nicola Branchini , Víctor Elvira

We propose bandit importance sampling (BIS), a powerful importance sampling framework tailored for settings in which evaluating the target density is computationally expensive. BIS facilitates accurate sampling while minimizing the required…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-17 Takuo Matsubara , Andrew Duncan , Simon Cotter , Konstantinos Zygalakis

We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Sepideh Mahabadi , David P. Woodruff , Samson Zhou

Multiple importance sampling (MIS) methods use a set of proposal distributions from which samples are drawn. Each sample is then assigned an importance weight that can be obtained according to different strategies. This work is motivated by…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-21 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , David Luengo , Mónica F. Bugallo

Adaptive Monte Carlo schemes developed over the last years usually seek to ensure ergodicity of the sampling process in line with MCMC tradition. This poses constraints on what is possible in terms of adaptation. In the general case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-07-22 Ingmar Schuster