Related papers: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive MCMC

Sampling algorithms drive probabilistic machine learning, and recent years have seen an explosion in the diversity of tools for this task. However, the increasing sophistication of sampling algorithms is correlated with an increase in the…

A Kernel Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is introduced, for the purpose of sampling from a target distribution with strongly nonlinear support. The algorithm embeds the trajectory of the Markov chain into a reproducing kernel Hilbert…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms to sample complex and high-dimensional probability distributions. The Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm, the workhorse of MCMC, provides a simple recipe to construct reversible…

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become popular in statistics as versatile techniques to sample from complicated probability distributions. In this work, we propose a method to parameterize and train transition kernels of Markov chains…

This work develops a powerful and versatile framework for determining acceptance ratios in Metropolis-Hastings type Markov kernels widely used in statistical sampling problems. Our approach allows us to derive new classes of kernels which…

The design of the proposal distributions, and most notably the kernel parameters, are crucial for the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) rendering. A poor selection of parameters can increase the correlation of the Markov chain…

Human ability of both versatile grasping of given objects and grasping of novel (as of yet unseen) objects is truly remarkable. This probably arises from the experience infants gather by actively playing around with diverse objects.…

In this paper we consider the basic version of Reinforcement Learning (RL) that involves computing optimal data driven (adaptive) policies for Markovian decision process with unknown transition probabilities. We provide a brief survey of…

A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…

Traditional methods for unsupervised learning of finite mixture models require to evaluate the likelihood of all components of the mixture. This becomes computationally prohibitive when the number of components is large, as it is, for…

MCMC algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings algorithms are slowed down by the computation of complex target distributions as exemplified by huge datasets. We offer in this paper a useful generalisation of the Delayed Acceptance approach,…

We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…

Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…

We present a coupling framework to upper bound the total variation mixing time of various Metropolis-adjusted, gradient-based Markov kernels in the `high acceptance regime'. The approach uses a localization argument to boost local mixing of…

Since its inception the Metropolis-Hastings kernel has been applied in sophisticated ways to address ever more challenging and diverse sampling problems. Its success stems from the flexibility brought by the fact that its verification and…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms ubiquitously employ complex deterministic transformations to generate proposal points that are then filtered by the Metropolis-Hastings-Green (MHG) test. However, the condition of the target…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful tool for computation with complex probability distributions. However the performance of such methods is critically dependant on properly tuned parameters, most of which are difficult if…

We propose a new kernel for Metropolis Hastings called Directional Metropolis Hastings (DMH) with multivariate update where the proposal kernel has state dependent covariance matrix. We use the derivative of the target distribution at the…

One of the most widely used samplers in practice is the component-wise Metropolis-Hastings (CMH) sampler that updates in turn the components of a vector valued Markov chain using accept-reject moves generated from a proposal distribution.…

In this work, we consider an online robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) where we have the information of finitely many prototypes of the underlying transition kernel. We consider an adaptively updated ambiguity set of the prototypes and…