English
Related papers

Related papers: Sequential Monte Carlo for Inclusive KL Minimizati…

200 papers

This article considers the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approximation of ratios of normalizing constants associated to posterior distributions which in principle rely on continuum models. Therefore, the Monte Carlo estimation error and the…

Computation · Statistics 2016-03-04 Pierre Del Moral , Ajay Jasra , Kody Law , Yan Zhou

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Michalis K. Titsias

We introduce an approach based on mirror descent and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to perform joint parameter inference and posterior estimation in latent variable models. This approach is based on minimisation of a functional over the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-07 Francesca R. Crucinio

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 James Cuin , Davide Carbone , Yanbo Tang , O. Deniz Akyildiz

We propose a robust and scalable variational Bayes (VB) framework designed to effectively handle contamination and outliers in dataset. Our approach partitions the data into $m$ disjoint subsets and formulates a joint optimization problem…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Jiawei Yan , Ju Liu , Weidong Liu , Jiyuan Tu

A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-06 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

This study tackles the efficient estimation of Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence in Dirichlet Mixture Models (DMM), crucial for clustering compositional data. Despite the significance of DMMs, obtaining an analytically tractable solution for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-20 Samyajoy Pal , Christian Heumann

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-30 Manuel Pulido , Peter Jan vanLeeuwen

We propose a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for sampling from unnormalized target distributions based on a reverse denoising diffusion process. While recent diffusion-based samplers simulate the reverse diffusion using…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-06 Luhuan Wu , Yi Han , Christian A. Naesseth , John P. Cunningham

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates language model inference by drafting tokens from a cheap proposal model and verifying them against an expensive target model via rejection sampling. Because rejection truncates the draft block at the…

We propose kernel sequential Monte Carlo (KSMC), a framework for sampling from static target densities. KSMC is a family of sequential Monte Carlo algorithms that are based on building emulator models of the current particle system in a…

Computation · Statistics 2017-07-26 Ingmar Schuster , Heiko Strathmann , Brooks Paige , Dino Sejdinovic

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-12-08 Yichao Li , Wenshuo Wang , Ke Deng , Jun S Liu

There is a growing interest in studying sequential neural posterior estimation (SNPE) techniques due to their advantages for simulation-based models with intractable likelihoods. The methods aim to learn the posterior from adaptively…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-16 Xiliang Yang , Yifei Xiong , Zhijian He

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used as a generative model to approximate a model's posterior on latent variables by combining the amortized variational inference and deep neural networks. However, when paired with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Qile Zhu , Jianlin Su , Wei Bi , Xiaojiang Liu , Xiyao Ma , Xiaolin Li , Dapeng Wu

The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 Jonas Latz , Iason Papaioannou , Elisabeth Ullmann

We establish epigraphical and uniform laws of large numbers for sample-based approximations of law invariant risk functionals. These sample-based approximation schemes include Monte Carlo (MC) and certain randomized quasi-Monte Carlo…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Olena Melnikov , Johannes Milz

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-24 Yvann Le Fay , Nicolas Chopin , Simon Barthelmé

We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. Under such an assumption,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-06-29 Xinzhu Liang , Shangda Yang , Simon L. Cotter , Kody J. H. Law

In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…

Computation · Statistics 2015-04-23 Thi Le Thu Nguyen , Francois Septier , Gareth W. Peters , Yves Delignon