Related papers: A connection between Tempering and Entropic Mirror…
Recently there has been renewed interests in derivative free approaches to stochastic optimization. In this paper, we examine the rates of convergence for the Kiefer-Wolfowitz algorithm and the mirror descent algorithm, under various…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are frequently used to approximately simulate high-dimensional, multimodal probability distributions. In adaptive MCMC methods, the transition kernel is changed "on the fly" in the hope to speed up…
In this work, a novel sequential Monte Carlo filter is introduced which aims at efficient sampling of high-dimensional state spaces with a limited number of particles. Particles are pushed forward from the prior to the posterior density…
This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…
The study of animal behavioural states inferred through hidden Markov models and similar state switching models has seen a significant increase in popularity in recent years. The ability to account for varying levels of behavioural scale…
Inspired by the remarkable success of large neural networks, there has been significant interest in understanding the generalization performance of over-parameterized models. Substantial efforts have been invested in characterizing how…
An extended ensemble Monte Carlo algorithm is proposed by introducing a violation of the detailed balance condition to the update scheme of the inverse temperature in simulated tempering. Our method, irreversible simulated tempering, is…
Simulated tempering is a widely used strategy for sampling from multimodal distributions. In this paper, we consider simulated tempering combined with an arbitrary local Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler and present a new decomposition…
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…
This paper illustrates novel methods for nonstationary time series modeling along with their applications to selected problems in neuroscience. These methods are semi-parametric in that inferences are derived by combining sequential…
We propose a new policy gradient method, named homotopic policy mirror descent (HPMD), for solving discounted, infinite horizon MDPs with finite state and action spaces. HPMD performs a mirror descent type policy update with an additional…
Selecting an appropriate divergence measure is a critical aspect of machine learning, as it directly impacts model performance. Among the most widely used, we find the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, originally introduced in kinetic…
The logarithmic divergence is an extension of the Bregman divergence motivated by optimal transport and a generalized convex duality, and satisfies many remarkable properties. Using the geometry induced by the logarithmic divergence, we…
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…
The Kullback-Leibler divergence or relative entropy is an information-theoretic measure between statistical models that play an important role in measuring a distance between random variables. In the study of complex systems, random fields…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) has become routinely used for sampling from posterior distributions. Its extension Riemann manifold HMC (RMHMC) modifies the proposal kernel through distortion of local distances by a Riemannian metric. The…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a class of techniques to sample approximately from any sequence of probability distributions using a combination of importance sampling and resampling steps. This paper is concerned with the…
This article is concerned with the multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods for approximating expectations of some functions of the solution to the Heston 3/2-model from mathematical finance, which takes values in $(0, \infty)$ and possesses…