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Mirror Descent (MD) is a well-known method of solving non-smooth convex optimization problems. This paper analyzes the stochastic variant of MD with adaptive stepsizes. Its convergence on average is shown to be faster than with the fixed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-08 Anastasia Bayandina

Employing Bayesian inference to calibrate constitutive model parameters has grown substantially in recent years. Among the available techniques, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling remains one of the most widely used approaches for…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aricia Rinkens , Rodrigo L. S. Silva , Erik Quaeghebeur , Nick Jaensson , Clemens Verhoosel

A common tool in the practice of Markov Chain Monte Carlo is to use approximating transition kernels to speed up computation when the desired kernel is slow to evaluate or intractable. A limited set of quantitative tools exist to assess the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-14 Jeffrey Negrea , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Parallel tempering is popular method for allowing MCMC algorithms to properly explore a $d$-dimensional multimodal target density. One problem with traditional power-based parallel tempering for multimodal targets is that the proportion of…

Computation · Statistics 2018-10-16 Nicholas G. Tawn , Gareth O. Roberts

We analyze continuous-time mirror descent applied to sparse phase retrieval, which is the problem of recovering sparse signals from a set of magnitude-only measurements. We apply mirror descent to the unconstrained empirical risk…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-21 Fan Wu , Patrick Rebeschini

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-04 Anas Cherradi , Yazid Janati , Alain Durmus , Sylvain Le Corff , Yohan Petetin , Julien Stoehr

This paper presents a comprehensive convergence analysis for the mirror descent (MD) method, a widely used algorithm in convex optimization. The key feature of this algorithm is that it provides a generalization of classical gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-16 Mengmou Li , Khaled Laib , Takeshi Hatanaka , Ioannis Lestas

This work presents self-rewarding sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), an inference-time scaling algorithm enabling effective sampling of masked diffusion language models (MDLMs). Our algorithm stems from the observation that most existing MDLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ziwei Luo , Ziqi Jin , Lei Wang , Lidong Bing , Thomas B. Schön

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is an inference algorithm for state space models that approximates the posterior by sampling from a sequence of target distributions. The target distributions are often chosen to be the filtering distributions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Dieterich Lawson , Allan Raventós , Andrew Warrington , Scott Linderman

In the context of Bayesian inversion for scientific and engineering modeling, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling strategies are the benchmark due to their flexibility and robustness in dealing with arbitrary posterior probability density…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-07 Han Lu , Mohammad Khalil , Thomas Catanach , Jiefu Chen , Xuqing Wu , Xin Fu , Cosmin Safta , Yueqin Huang

Smoothness is crucial for attaining fast rates in first-order optimization. However, many optimization problems in modern machine learning involve non-smooth objectives. Recent studies relax the smoothness assumption by allowing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-11 Dingzhi Yu , Wei Jiang , Hongyi Tao , Yuanyu Wan , Lijun Zhang

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) algorithms, such as model predictive path integral (MPPI), enable approximate, gradient-free solutions to optimal control problems by drawing samples from a proposal distribution, evaluating…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-11 Markus Walker , Marcel Reith-Braun , Daniel Frisch , Uwe D. Hanebeck

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are essential tools in computational statistics for sampling from unnormalised probability distributions, but can be fragile when targeting high-dimensional, multimodal, or complex target…

Mirror descent is an elegant optimization technique that leverages a dual space of parametric models to perform gradient descent. While originally developed for convex optimization, it has increasingly been applied in the field of machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Hyungjoon Soh , Dongyeob Kim , Juno Hwang , Junghyo Jo

The t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) is a powerful and popular method for visualizing high-dimensional data. It minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the original and embedded data distributions. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Daniel Jiwoong Im , Nakul Verma , Kristin Branson

The paper is devoted to a special Mirror Descent algorithm for problems of convex minimization with functional constraints. The objective function may not satisfy the Lipschitz condition, but it must necessarily have the Lipshitz-continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-04-17 Fedor S. Stonyakin , Alexander A. Titov

We study inference-time alignment for diffusion-based generative models, aiming to steer a base model toward high-reward outputs without updating its weights. Recent Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)-based steering methods approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Weixin Wang , Yu Yang , Wei Deng , Pan Xu

The part of the analysis of the convergence rate of the mirror descent method that is connected with the adaptive time-varying step size rules due to Alkousa et al. (MOTOR 2024, pp. 3-18) is corrected. Moreover, a Lipschitz-free mirror…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-03 Bowen Yuan , Mohammad S. Alkousa

Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-23 Dao Nguyen

An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-19 Boris Belousov , Jan Peters