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Most Markov chain Monte Carlo methods operate in discrete time and are reversible with respect to the target probability. Nevertheless, it is now understood that the use of non-reversible Markov chains can be beneficial in many contexts. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-02-23 Chris Sherlock , Alexandre H. Thiery

Estimating the transition dynamics of controlled Markov chains is crucial in fields such as time series analysis, reinforcement learning, and system exploration. Traditional non-parametric density estimation methods often assume independent…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-05-21 Imon Banerjee , Vinayak Rao , Harsha Honnappa

Constrained decoding enables Language Models (LMs) to produce samples that provably satisfy hard constraints. However, existing constrained-decoding approaches often distort the underlying model distribution, a limitation that is especially…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Emmanuel Anaya Gonzalez , Sairam Vaidya , Kanghee Park , Ruyi Ji , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Loris D'Antoni

Adaptive importance sampling is a powerful tool to sample from complicated target densities, but its success depends sensitively on the initial proposal density. An algorithm is presented to automatically perform the initialization using…

Computation · Statistics 2013-05-01 Frederik Beaujean , Allen Caldwell

Specifying a full Bayesian model that integrates multiple data sources can be challenging. One natural approach is to specify each individual model separately and join them afterwards. This is the approach adopted in Markov melding.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-22 Yixuan Liu , Robert J. B. Goudie

In this paper, we provide new insights on the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm. We show that this method can be formulated as a first order optimization algorithm of an objective functional defined on the Wasserstein space of order $2$. Using…

Computation · Statistics 2018-03-30 Alain Durmus , Szymon Majewski , Błażej Miasojedow

We introduce a general framework that constructs estimators with reduced variance for random walk Metropolis and Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms. The resulting estimators require negligible computational cost and are derived in a…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-07 Angelos Alexopoulos , Petros Dellaportas , Michalis K. Titsias

Motivated by the problem of exploring discrete but very complex state spaces in Bayesian models, we propose a novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo search algorithm: the taxicab sampler. We describe the construction of this sampler and discuss how…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-04 Vincent Geels , Matthew Pratola , Radu Herbei

The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Hao Wu , Jonas Köhler , Frank Noé

To sample from a given target distribution, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling relies on constructing an ergodic Markov chain with the target distribution as its invariant measure. For any MCMC method, an important question is how to…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Federica Milinanni , Pierre Nyquist

We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-23 Yi-An Ma , Niladri Chatterji , Xiang Cheng , Nicolas Flammarion , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Path integrals with complex actions are encountered for many physical systems ranging from spin- or mass-imbalanced atomic gases and graphene to quantum chromo-dynamics at finite density to the non-equilibrium evolution of quantum systems.…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2022-09-01 Lukas Kades , Martin Gärttner , Thomas Gasenzer , Jan M. Pawlowski

This paper studies the estimation of low-rank Markov chains from empirical trajectories. We propose a non-convex estimator based on rank-constrained likelihood maximization. Statistical upper bounds are provided for the Kullback-Leiber…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-20 Xudong Li , Mengdi Wang , Anru Zhang

Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods augmented with additive noise, and are widely used in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and machine learning. In recent years, the non-asymptotic analysis of Langevin…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Yuping Zheng , Andrew Lamperski

Recently non-reversible samplers based on simulating piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) have shown potential for efficient sampling in Bayesian inference problems. However, there remains a lack of guidance on how to best…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-28 Matthew Sutton , Paul Fearnhead

Metropolis algorithms are classical tools for sampling from target distributions, with broad applications in statistics and scientific computing. Their convergence speed is governed by the spectral gap of the associated Markov operator.…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Shuigen Liu , Xin T. Tong

Phase transitions appear all over science, and are familiar from everyday life, as water boiling, sugar melting into caramel or as nematic molecules turning smectic in liquid-crystal displays. The dynamics of phase transitions can be…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-03-18 Gabriele Tartero , Sora Shiratani , Werner Krauth

Bayesian methods of sampling from a posterior distribution are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to precisely display the uncertainty of a model fit. Classical methods based on iterative random sampling and posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-04 Jacopo Guidolin , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Ondřej Kuželka

We propose a method to efficiently integrate truncated probability densities. The method uses Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample from a probability density matching the function being integrated. The required normalisation or…

Computation · Statistics 2013-12-10 A. John Arul , Kannan Iyer

We consider a recurrent Markov process which is an It\^o semi-martingale. The L\'evy kernel describes the law of its jumps. Based on observations X(0),X({\Delta}),...,X(n{\Delta}), we construct an estimator for the L\'evy kernel's density.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-05-14 Florian A. J. Ueltzhöfer