Related papers: Stein $\Pi$-Importance Sampling

We study continuous-time Markov chains on the non-negative integers under mild regularity conditions (in particular, the set of jump vectors is finite and both forward and backward jumps are possible). Based on the so-called flux balance…

We consider the problem of designing a control policy for an infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov decision process $\mathcal{M}$ when we only have access to an approximate model $\hat{\mathcal{M}}$. How well does an optimal policy…

We consider the computational task of sampling a bit string $x$ from a distribution $\pi(x)=|\langle x|\psi\rangle|^2$, where $\psi$ is the unique ground state of a local Hamiltonian $H$. Our main result describes a direct link between the…

There is a tension between robustness and efficiency when designing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms. Here we focus on robustness with respect to tuning parameters, showing that more sophisticated algorithms tend to be…

In this article, we address the issues that come up in the design of importance sampling schemes for rare events associated to stochastic dynamical systems. We focus on the issue of metastability and on the effect of multiple scales. We…

Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) moves particles along a Markov chain from a tractable initial distribution to an intractable target distribution. The recently proposed Differentiable AIS (DAIS) (Geffner and Domke, 2021; Zhang et al.,…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling probability density functions (combined with abundant computational resources) have transformed the sciences, especially in performing probabilistic inferences, or fitting models to data.…

Bayesian methods have received increasing attention in medical research, where sensitivity analysis of prior distributions is essential. Such analyses typically require the evaluation of the posterior distribution of a parameter under…

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…

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…

The numerical approximation of posterior expected quantities of interest is considered. A novel control variate technique is proposed for post-processing of Markov chain Monte Carlo output, based both on Stein's method and an approach to…

Sampling from a complex distribution $\pi$ and approximating its intractable normalizing constant Z are challenging problems. In this paper, a novel family of importance samplers (IS) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers is derived.…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods require a large number of samples to approximate a posterior distribution, which can be costly when the likelihood or prior is expensive to evaluate. The number of samples can be reduced if we can…

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) hinges on the efficient training of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) for non-convex optimization and uncertainty quantification, which boils down to a non-convex Bayesian learning problem. A…

Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…

Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…

We apply the Stein-Chen method to problems from extreme value theory. On the one hand, the Stein-Chen method for Poisson approximation allows us to obtain bounds on the Kolmogorov distance between the law of the maximum of i.i.d. random…

Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…