Related papers: Statistical Mechanics Calculations Using Variation…
We propose a general framework for solving statistical mechanics of systems with finite size. The approach extends the celebrated variational mean-field approaches using autoregressive neural networks, which support direct sampling and…
In this comment on "Solving Statistical Mechanics Using Variational Autoregressive Networks" by Wu et al., we propose a subtle yet powerful modification of their approach. We show that the inherent sampling error of their method can be…
Estimating free energy is a fundamental problem in statistical mechanics. Recently, machine-learning-based methods, particularly the variational autoregressive networks (VANs) have been proposed to minimize variational free energy and to…
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…
Autoregressive Neural Networks (ANN) have been recently proposed as a mechanism to improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo algorithms for several spin systems. The idea relies on the fact that the total probability of a configuration can be…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
Probabilistic graphical models are a key tool in machine learning applications. Computing the partition function, i.e., normalizing constant, is a fundamental task of statistical inference but it is generally computationally intractable,…
Approximate Bayesian computation methods are useful for generative models with intractable likelihoods. These methods are however sensitive to the dimension of the parameter space, requiring exponentially increasing resources as this…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
We describe a variational approximation method for efficient inference in large-scale probabilistic models. Variational methods are deterministic procedures that provide approximations to marginal and conditional probabilities of interest.…
Studying general quantum many-body systems is one of the major challenges in modern physics because it requires an amount of computational resources that scales exponentially with the size of the system.Simulating the evolution of a state,…
This paper studies a method, which has been proposed in the Physics literature by [8, 7, 10], for estimating the quasi-stationary distribution. In contrast to existing methods in eigenvector estimation, the method eliminates the need for…
We extend the ability of unitary quantum circuits by interfacing it with classical autoregressive neural networks. The combined model parametrizes a variational density matrix as a classical mixture of quantum pure states, where the…
Gaussian variational approximation is a popular methodology to approximate posterior distributions in Bayesian inference especially in high dimensional and large data settings. To control the computational cost while being able to capture…
A canonical approach to approximating the partition function of a Gibbs distribution via sampling is simulated annealing. This method has led to efficient reductions from counting to sampling, including: $\bullet$ classic non-adaptive…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
Generative modeling using samples drawn from the probability distribution constitutes a powerful approach for unsupervised machine learning. Quantum mechanical systems can produce probability distributions that exhibit quantum correlations…
We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…
We show how to use a variational approximation to the logistic function to perform approximate inference in Bayesian networks containing discrete nodes with continuous parents. Essentially, we convert the logistic function to a Gaussian,…
The PAC-Bayesian approach is a powerful set of techniques to derive non- asymptotic risk bounds for random estimators. The corresponding optimal distribution of estimators, usually called the Gibbs posterior, is unfortunately intractable.…