Related papers: Sequential Monte Carlo for Inclusive KL Minimizati…
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…
The Plackett-Luce (PL) model is ubiquitous in learning-to-rank (LTR) because it provides a useful and intuitive probabilistic model for sampling ranked lists. Counterfactual offline evaluation and optimization of ranking metrics are pivotal…
The multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method has been used for a wide variety of stochastic applications. In this paper we consider its use in situations in which input random variables can be replaced by similar approximate random variables…
We build on auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo (AESMC): a method for model and proposal learning based on maximizing the lower bound to the log marginal likelihood in a broad family of structured probabilistic models. Our approach relies…
We have reformulated the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) technique so that a large part of the calculation scales linearly with the number of atoms. The reformulation is related to a recent alternative proposal for achieving linear-scaling QMC,…
Accelerated algorithms for maximum likelihood image reconstruction are essential for emerging applications such as 3D tomography, dynamic tomographic imaging, and other high dimensional inverse problems. In this paper, we introduce and…
This paper proposes a synergy of amortised and particle-based methods for sampling from distributions defined by unnormalised density functions. We state a connection between sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and neural sequential samplers…
Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a powerful and fast-growing method for optimizing and evolving parameterized many-body wave functions, especially with modern neural-network quantum states. In practice, however, the stochastic estimators…
Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…
Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…
Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms (also known as particle filters) are popular methods to approximate filtering (and related) distributions of state-space models. However, they converge at the slow $1/\sqrt{N}$ rate, which may be an issue…
Many problems require to approximate an expected value by some kind of Monte Carlo (MC) sampling, e.g. molecular dynamics (MD) or simulation of stochastic reaction models (also termed kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC)). Often, we are furthermore…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC…
Multi-sample, importance-weighted variational autoencoders (IWAE) give tighter bounds and more accurate uncertainty estimates than variational autoencoders (VAE) trained with a standard single-sample objective. However, IWAEs scale poorly:…
We propose a novel class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms, appropriate for inference in probabilistic graphical models. This class of algorithms adopts a divide-and-conquer approach based upon an auxiliary tree-structured…
We propose Pathfinder, a variational method for approximately sampling from differentiable log densities. Starting from a random initialization, Pathfinder locates normal approximations to the target density along a quasi-Newton…
Existing score-based methods for inverse problems often resort to approximate minimization of the KL divergence between the inversion distribution and the Bayesian posterior. Such an approximation leads to severe mode collapse and…
Classical algorithms in numerical analysis for numerical integration (quadrature/cubature) follow the principle of approximate and integrate: the integrand is approximated by a simple function (e.g. a polynomial), which is then integrated…