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Related papers: Mean-Field Microcanonical Gradient Descent

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Sampling from unnormalized densities is analogous to the generative modeling problem, but the target distribution is defined by a known energy function instead of data samples. Because evaluating the energy function is often costly, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Aaron Havens , Brian Karrer , Neta Shaul

We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-04-07 Dougal Maclaurin , David Duvenaud , Ryan P. Adams

Sampling from various kinds of distributions is an issue of paramount importance in statistics since it is often the key ingredient for constructing estimators, test procedures or confidence intervals. In many situations, the exact sampling…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-11-05 Avetik Karagulyan

Diffusion models generate high-quality synthetic data. They operate by defining a continuous-time forward process which gradually adds Gaussian noise to data until fully corrupted. The corresponding reverse process progressively "denoises"…

Many problems arising in applications result in the need to probe a probability distribution for functions. Examples include Bayesian nonparametric statistics and conditioned diffusion processes. Standard MCMC algorithms typically become…

Computation · Statistics 2015-03-20 S. L. Cotter , G. O. Roberts , A. M. Stuart , D. White

Mean-Field is an efficient way to approximate a posterior distribution in complex graphical models and constitutes the most popular class of Bayesian variational approximation methods. In most applications, the mean field distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-23 Pierre Baqué , Jean-Hubert Hours , François Fleuret , Pascal Fua

We develop a regularization of the quantum microcanonical ensemble, called a Gaussian ensemble, which can be used for derivation of the canonical ensemble from microcanonical principles. The derivation differs from the usual methods by…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2008-11-26 Jani Lukkarinen

We propose a new recursive procedure to estimate the microcanonical density of states in multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations which relies only on measurements of moments of the energy distribution, avoiding entirely the need for energy…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 J. Viana Lopes , Miguel D. Costa , J. M. B. Lopes dos Santos , R. Toral

We present a novel Ensemble Monte Carlo Growth method to sample the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of random chains. The method is based on the multicanonical technique of computing the density of states in the energy space. Such a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2020-03-04 Graziano Vernizzi , Trung Dac Nguyen , Henri Orland , Monica Olvera de la Cruz

We develop a geometric foundation of microcanonical thermodynamics in which entropy and its derivatives are determined from the geometry of phase space, rather than being introduced through an a priori ensemble postulate. Once the minimal…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-30 Loris Di Cairano

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-13 Tao Sun , Yuejiao Sun , Wotao Yin

Sampling random graphs with given properties is a key step in the analysis of networks, as random ensembles represent basic null models required to identify patterns such as communities and motifs. An important requirement is that the…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-02-23 Tiziano Squartini , Rossana Mastrandrea , Diego Garlaschelli

When machine learning models encounter data which is out of the distribution on which they were trained they have a tendency to behave poorly, most prominently over-confidence in erroneous predictions. Such behaviours will have disastrous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Jack Dymond

This work analyzes the convergence of a class of smoothing-based gradient descent methods when applied to optimization problems. In particular, Gaussian smoothing is employed to define a nonlocal gradient that reduces high-frequency noise,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-27 Andrew Starnes , Anton Dereventsov , Clayton Webster

In this work, we study the mean-field flow for learning subspace-sparse polynomials using stochastic gradient descent and two-layer neural networks, where the input distribution is standard Gaussian and the output only depends on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Ziang Chen , Rong Ge

Denoising generative models, such as diffusion and flow-based models, produce high-quality samples but require many denoising steps due to discretization error. Flow maps, which estimate the average velocity between timesteps, mitigate this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Kyungmin Lee , Sihyun Yu , Jinwoo Shin

The resolution of many large-scale inverse problems using MCMC methods requires a step of drawing samples from a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. While direct Gaussian sampling techniques, such as those based on Cholesky…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-06-22 Clément Gilavert , Saïd Moussaoui , Jérôme Idier

Multifidelity models integrate data from multiple sources to produce a single approximator for the underlying process. Dense low-fidelity samples are used to reduce interpolation error, while sparse high-fidelity samples are used to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-27 Viv Bone , Chris van der Heide , Kieran Mackle , Ingo H. J. Jahn , Peter M. Dower , Chris Manzie

We consider the problem of inference in discrete probabilistic models, that is, distributions over subsets of a finite ground set. These encompass a range of well-known models in machine learning, such as determinantal point processes and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Alkis Gotovos , Hamed Hassani , Andreas Krause , Stefanie Jegelka