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The momentum Schr\"odinger Bridge (mSB) has emerged as a leading method for accelerating generative diffusion processes and reducing transport costs. However, the lack of simulation-free properties inevitably results in high training costs…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-29 Kevin Rojas , Yixin Tan , Molei Tao , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Wei Deng

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…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-02 Richard G Everitt , Richard Culliford , Felipe Medina-Aguayo , Daniel J Wilson

Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-20 Tim Salimans , Diederik P. Kingma , Max Welling

Recently, a series of papers proposed deep learning-based approaches to sample from target distributions using controlled diffusion processes, being trained only on the unnormalized target densities without access to samples. Building on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Lorenz Richter , Julius Berner

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have recently shown successful results for conditional sampling of generative diffusion models. In this paper we propose a new diffusion posterior SMC sampler achieving improved statistical efficiencies,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Zheng Zhao

Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) is a powerful method for evaluating high-dimensional integrals. However, its use is typically limited to distributions where direct sampling is straightforward, such as the uniform distribution on the unit hypercube…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-12-24 Sifan Liu

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as powerful frameworks for generating structured categorical data. However, efficiently sampling from reward-tilted distributions remains a fundamental challenge. While Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jaihoon Kim , Taehoon Yoon , Prin Phunyaphibarn , Seungjun Kim , Morteza Mardani , Minhyuk Sung

The efficient resolution of Bayesian inverse problems remains challenging due to the high computational cost of traditional sampling methods. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that integrates Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Daniil Sherki , Ivan Oseledets , Ekaterina Muravleva

We propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) method for collision-free navigation that uses amortized variational inference to approximate the distribution of optimal control sequences by training a normalizing flow conditioned on the start,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Thomas Power , Dmitry Berenson

Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) and its Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) extensions are state-of-the-art methods for estimating normalizing constants of probability distributions. We propose here a novel Monte Carlo algorithm, Annealed Flow…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-12 Michael Arbel , Alexander G. D. G. Matthews , Arnaud Doucet

We propose sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods for sampling the posterior distribution of state-space models under highly informative observation regimes, a situation in which standard SMC methods can perform poorly. A special case is…

Computation · Statistics 2015-07-10 Pierre Del Moral , Lawrence M. Murray

Cross-entropy method model predictive control (CEM--MPC) is a powerful gradient-free technique for nonlinear optimal control, but its performance is often limited by the reliance on random sampling. This conventional approach can lead to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-12 Markus Walker , Daniel Frisch , Uwe D. Hanebeck

Bayesian phylogenetic inference is often conducted via local or sequential search over topologies and branch lengths using algorithms such as random-walk Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or Combinatorial Sequential Monte Carlo (CSMC).…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-21 Antonio Khalil Moretti , Liyi Zhang , Christian A. Naesseth , Hadiah Venner , David Blei , Itsik Pe'er

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-17 Yichuan Zhang , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

The Diffusion Monte Carlo method with constant number of walkers, also called Stochastic Reconfiguration as well as Sequential Monte Carlo, is a widely used Monte Carlo methodology for computing the ground-state energy and wave function of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-12-09 Michel Caffarel , Pierre del Moral , Luc de Montella

Discrete diffusion models have become highly effective across various domains. However, real-world applications often require the generative process to adhere to certain constraints. To this end, we propose a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zijing Ou , Chinmay Pani , Yingzhen Li

In this paper we develop a general framework for constructing and analysing coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers, allowing for both (possibly degenerate) diffusion and piecewise deterministic Markov processes. For many performance…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-06-29 N. Nuesken , G. A. Pavliotis

In Bayesian applications, there is a huge interest in rapid and accurate estimation of the posterior distribution, particularly for high dimensional or hierarchical models. In this article, we propose to use optimization to solve for a…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-12 Leo L. Duan

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-08 Yichao Li , Wenshuo Wang , Ke Deng , Jun S Liu