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Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
The Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method which creates a Markov chain reversible with respect to a given target distribution, pi^N, with Lebesgue density on R^N; it can hence be used to…
Inexact Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods rely on Markov chains that do not exactly preserve the target distribution. Examples include the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) and unadjusted Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (uHMC). This paper…
We propose a novel method for sampling and optimization tasks based on a stochastic interacting particle system. We explain how this method can be used for the following two goals: (i) generating approximate samples from a given target…
We study a distributionally robust mean square error estimation problem over a nonconvex Wasserstein ambiguity set containing only normal distributions. We show that the optimal estimator and the least favorable distribution form a Nash…
Parameter estimation is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks such as neural network weight fitting and Bayesian inference. This paper focuses on the complexity of estimating translation $\boldsymbol{\mu} \in…
To adopt neural networks in safety critical domains, knowing whether we can trust their predictions is crucial. Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide uncertainty estimates by averaging predictions with respect to the posterior weight…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…
Selecting powerful predictors for an outcome is a cornerstone task for machine learning. However, some types of questions can only be answered by identifying the predictors that causally affect the outcome. A recent approach to this causal…
In this work, we investigate a stochastic control framework for global optimization over both Euclidean spaces and the Wasserstein space of probability measures, where the objective function may be non-convex and/or non-differentiable. In…
In this paper, we address the challenge of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms within the approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) framework, which often get trapped in local optima due to their inherent local exploration mechanism. We…
Sampling-based methods have become a cornerstone of contemporary approaches to Model Predictive Control (MPC), as they make no restrictions on the differentiability of the dynamics or cost function and are straightforward to parallelize.…
Computing the marginal likelihood (also called the Bayesian model evidence) is an important task in Bayesian model selection, providing a principled quantitative way to compare models. The learned harmonic mean estimator solves the…
We consider the problem of sampling from a strongly log-concave density in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and prove a non-asymptotic upper bound on the mixing time of the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA). The method draws samples by…
We introduce a new method for solving nonlinear continuous optimization problems with chance constraints. Our method is based on a reformulation of the probabilistic constraint as a quantile function. The quantile function is approximated…
This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…
The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to conduct such sampling, but such a method can converge…
Wasserstein barycenter, built on the theory of optimal transport, provides a powerful framework to aggregate probability distributions, and it has increasingly attracted great attention within the machine learning community. However, it…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for solving continuous nonlinear-equality-constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are defined by expectations or averages over large, finite numbers of…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…