Related papers: Sequential Monte Carlo for Inclusive KL Minimizati…
We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…
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…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has gained popularity over the past few years for the analysis of complex models arising in population genetic, epidemiology and system biology. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) approaches have become work…
Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…
A body of recent work has focused on constructing a variational family of filtered distributions using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). Inspired by this work, we introduce Particle Smoothing Variational Objectives (SVO), a novel backward…
Over the years, sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and, equivalently, particle filter (PF) theory has gained substantial attention from researchers. However, the performance of the resampling methodology, also known as offspring selection, has…
In the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for sequential simulations such as the neural stochastic differential equations, the Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) method is known to offer better theoretical computational complexity compared to the…
The generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) is widely used for analyzing correlated data, particularly in large-scale biomedical and social science applications. Scalable Bayesian inference for GLMMs is challenging because the marginal…
Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…
One of the goals in scaling sequential machine learning methods pertains to dealing with high-dimensional data spaces. A key related challenge is that many methods heavily depend on obtaining the inverse covariance matrix of the data. It is…
This work introduces a new method designed for Bayesian deep learning called scalable Bayesian Monte Carlo (SBMC). The method is comprised of a model and an algorithm. The model interpolates between a point estimator and the posterior. The…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods are standard tools for inferring parameters of complex models when the likelihood function is analytically intractable. A popular approach to improving the poor acceptance rate of the basic…
This paper addresses the problem of approximating an unknown probability distribution with density $f$ -- which can only be evaluated up to an unknown scaling factor -- with the help of a sequential algorithm that produces at each iteration…
We propose a new framework of variance-reduced Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) methods for sampling from an $L$-smooth and $m$-strongly log-concave distribution, based on a unified formulation of biased and unbiased variance reduction…
We study the feature-scaled version of the Monte Carlo algorithm with linear function approximation. This algorithm converges to a scale-invariant solution, which is not unduly affected by states having feature vectors with large norms. The…
In this work, we tackle the problem of minimising the Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of output quantities of complex differential models with random input data, using gradient-based approaches in combination with the Multi-Level Monte…
Sequential Monte Carlo samplers represent a compelling approach to posterior inference in Bayesian models, due to being parallelisable and providing an unbiased estimate of the posterior normalising constant. In this work, we significantly…
We introduce a new class of sequential Monte Carlo methods which reformulates the essence of the nested sampling method of Skilling (2006) in terms of sequential Monte Carlo techniques. Two new algorithms are proposed, nested sampling via…
The importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE) (Burda et al., 2016) is a popular variational-inference method which achieves a tighter evidence bound (and hence a lower bias) than standard variational autoencoders by optimising a multi-sample…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…