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Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) or diffusions are continuous-valued continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in the applied and mathematical sciences. Simulating paths from these processes is usually an intractable problem,…
Bayesian inference with nested sampling requires a likelihood-restricted prior sampling method, which draws samples from the prior distribution that exceed a likelihood threshold. For high-dimensional problems, Markov Chain Monte Carlo…
Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…
This paper is concerned with differentiable resampling in the context of sequential Monte Carlo (e.g., particle filtering). Drawing on reparametrisation, we propose a new resampling method that is informative and instantly differentiable,…
Improving Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm efficiency is essential for enhancing computational speed and inferential accuracy in Bayesian analysis. These improvements can be effectively achieved using the ancillarity-sufficiency…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), also known as particle filters, has been widely accepted as a powerful computational tool for making inference with dynamical systems. A key step in SMC is resampling, which plays the role of steering the…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for hidden Markov models often rely on the forward-backward sampler. This makes them computationally slow as the length of the time series increases, motivating the development of…
This paper introduces methodology for performing Bayesian inference sequentially on a sequence of posteriors on spaces of different dimensions. We show how this may be achieved through the use of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers (Del…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is dominated by the cost of rollout generation, which has motivated the use of low-precision rollouts (e.g., FP8) paired with a BF16 trainer to improve throughput and reduce…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become popular in statistics as versatile techniques to sample from complicated probability distributions. In this work, we propose a method to parameterize and train transition kernels of Markov chains…
Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…
We propose Adaptive Incremental Mixture Markov chain Monte Carlo (AIMM), a novel approach to sample from challenging probability distributions defined on a general state-space. While adaptive MCMC methods usually update a parametric…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
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…
Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian posterior inference is a common approach used in machine learning. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures that are used are often discrete-time analogues of associated stochastic differential equations…
A new class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, based on simulating piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs), have recently shown great promise: they are non-reversible, can mix better than standard MCMC algorithms, and…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is a popular class of methods for sampling from an intractable target distribution using a sequence of simpler intermediate distributions. Like other importance sampling-based methods,…
Statisticians often use Monte Carlo methods to approximate probability distributions, primarily with Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. Sequential Monte Carlo samplers are a class of algorithms that combine both techniques to…
Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…