English
Related papers

Related papers: Adaptive importance sampling for heavy-tailed dist…

200 papers

The imbalance (or long-tail) is the nature of many real-world data distributions, which often induces the undesirable bias of deep classification models toward frequent classes, resulting in poor performance for tail classes. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Fudong Lin , Xu Yuan

Sampling from multimodal distributions is a central challenge in Bayesian inference and machine learning. In light of hardness results for sampling -- classical MCMC methods, even with tempering, can suffer from exponential mixing times --…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-23 Holden Lee , Matheau Santana-Gijzen

Off-policy problems such as policy staleness and training--inference mismatch have become a major bottleneck for training stability and further exploration in LLM RL. The distribution gap between the inference and updated policies grows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chenlu Ye , Xuanchang Zhang , Yifan Hao , Zhou Yu , Ziji Zhang , Abhinav Gullapalli , Hao Chen , Jing Huang , Tong Zhang

Recent policy optimization approaches (Schulman et al., 2015a; 2017) have achieved substantial empirical successes by constructing new proxy optimization objectives. These proxy objectives allow stable and low variance policy learning, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Marcin B. Tomczak , Dongho Kim , Peter Vrancx , Kee-Eung Kim

We study convergence rates of the annealed importance sampling algorithm (Neal '01) combined with Langevin Monte Carlo when the target is a multimodal Gibbs measure. The main result shows that for a fixed error threshold, the time…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Akshat Agarwal , Gautam Iyer , Aidan Jameson , Seungjae Son , Wyatt Wimmer

This work studies social learning under non-stationary conditions. Although designed for online inference, classic social learning algorithms perform poorly under drifting conditions. To mitigate this drawback, we propose the Adaptive…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-05 Virginia Bordignon , Vincenzo Matta , Ali H. Sayed

Non-stationary multi-armed bandit (NS-MAB) problems have recently received significant attention. NS-MAB are typically modelled in two scenarios: abruptly changing, where reward distributions remain constant for a certain period and change…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Han Qi , Yue Wang , Li Zhu

Thompson sampling (TS) is a class of algorithms for sequential decision-making, which requires maintaining a posterior distribution over a model. However, calculating exact posterior distributions is intractable for all but the simplest…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-21 Ruiyi Zhang , Zheng Wen , Changyou Chen , Lawrence Carin

Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

We propose a new testing procedure about the tail weight parameter of multivariate Student $t$ distributions by having recourse to the Le Cam methodology. Our test is asymptotically as efficient as the classical likelihood ratio test, but…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-04-10 Christophe Ley , Anouk Neven

Given an unnormalized target distribution we want to obtain approximate samples from it and a tight lower bound on its (log) normalization constant log Z. Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) with Hamiltonian MCMC is a powerful method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke

Neural networks are popular state-of-the-art models for many different tasks.They are often trained via back-propagation to find a value of the weights that correctly predicts the observed data. Although back-propagation has shown good…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-29 Simón Rodríguez Santana , Daniel Hernández-Lobato

Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) is a broad family of imitation learning methods designed to mimic expert behaviors from demonstrations. While AIL has shown state-of-the-art performance on imitation learning with only small number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Estimation of the extreme value index under right censoring is a fundamental problem in extreme value theory, with important applications in finance, insurance, and reliability. Classical integral estimators for Pareto-type tails typically…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Abdelhakim Necir , Nour Elhouda Guesmia , Djamel Meraghni

Heavy-tailed probability distributions are extremely useful and play a crucial role in modeling different types of financial data sets. This study presents a two-pronged methodology. First, a mixture probability distribution is created by…

Applications · Statistics 2025-10-14 Pankaj Kumar , Vivek Vijay

This article investigates the integration of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods using the Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling (AMIS). Traditional Importance Sampling (IS) often suffers from poor performance since it heavily relies on the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-05-14 Jianlong Chen , Jiarui Du , Xiaoqun Wang , Zhijian He

We consider the sample efficient estimation of failure probabilities from expensive oracle evaluations of a limit state function via importance sampling (IS). In contrast to conventional ``two stage'' approaches, which first train a…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-10 Ashwin Renganathan , Annie S. Booth

We propose GradTail, an algorithm that uses gradients to improve model performance on the fly in the face of long-tailed training data distributions. Unlike conventional long-tail classifiers which operate on converged - and possibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Zhao Chen , Vincent Casser , Henrik Kretzschmar , Dragomir Anguelov

Detectors trained with massive labeled data often exhibit dramatic performance degradation in some particular scenarios with data distribution gap. To alleviate this problem of domain shift, conventional wisdom typically concentrates solely…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Liang Zhao , Limin Wang

We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Kaiyuan Zhou , Xiaoyu Zhang , Wenyang Zhang , Di Wang