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Variational inference is a powerful paradigm for approximate Bayesian inference with a number of appealing properties, including support for model learning and data subsampling. By contrast MCMC methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo do not…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-14 Martin Jankowiak , Du Phan

Sampling from high-dimensional distributions has wide applications in data science and machine learning but poses significant computational challenges. We introduce Subspace Langevin Monte Carlo (SLMC), a novel and efficient sampling method…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Tyler Maunu , Jiayi Yao

We study some notions of negative dependence of a sampling scheme that can be used to derive variance bounds for the corresponding estimator or discrepancy bounds for the underlying random point set that are at least as good as the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-02-10 Michael Gnewuch , Marcin Wnuk , Nils Hebbinghaus

Constrained decoding enables Language Models (LMs) to produce samples that provably satisfy hard constraints. However, existing constrained-decoding approaches often distort the underlying model distribution, a limitation that is especially…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Emmanuel Anaya Gonzalez , Sairam Vaidya , Kanghee Park , Ruyi Ji , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Loris D'Antoni

We introduce a novel framework for efficient sampling from complex, unnormalised target distributions by exploiting multiscale dynamics. Traditional score-based sampling methods either rely on learned approximations of the score function or…

Computation · Statistics 2025-11-04 Paula Cordero-Encinar , Andrew B. Duncan , Sebastian Reich , O. Deniz Akyildiz

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

This work introduces a novel multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) metamodeling approach for variance function estimation. Although devising an efficient experimental design for simulation metamodeling can be elusive, the MLMC-based approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-22 Jingtao Zhang , Xi Chen

This paper focuses on the study of an original combination of the Multilevel Monte Carlo method introduced by Giles [10] and the popular importance sampling technique. To compute the optimal choice of the parameter involved in the…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-09-05 Mohamed Ben Alaya , Kaouther Hajji , Ahmed Kebaier

Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-12 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , Scott D. Brown , Guy E. Hawkins

Estimating risk measures such as large loss probabilities and Value-at-Risk is fundamental in financial risk management and often relies on computationally intensive nested Monte Carlo methods. While Multi-Level Monte Carlo (MLMC)…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-10-23 Alexandre Boumezoued , Adel Cherchali , Vincent Lemaire , Gilles Pagès , Mathieu Truc

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art model-based adaptive sampling approaches for single-objective black-box optimization (BBO). While BBO literature includes various promising sampling techniques, there is still a lack of comprehensive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-25 Nazanin Nezami , Hadis Anahideh

Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…

Computation · Statistics 2024-09-09 Adrien Corenflos , Matthew Sutton , Nicolas Chopin

In many stochastic problems, the output of interest depends on an input random vector mainly through a single random variable (or index) via an appropriate univariate transformation of the input. We exploit this feature by proposing an…

Computation · Statistics 2021-11-16 Erik Hintz , Marius Hofert , Christiane Lemieux , Yoshihiro Taniguchi

Monte Carlo simulations are based on the manipulation of random numbers to evaluate probable outcomes, with applicability in a variety of different fields. By assigning probabilities, which can be determined a priori, to various events, it…

Physics Education · Physics 2022-01-03 Parasuraman Swaminathan

Score based approaches to sampling have shown much success as a generative algorithm to produce new samples from a target density given a pool of initial samples. In this work, we consider if we have no initial samples from the target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-08 Curtis McDonald , Andrew Barron

In the field of structural reliability, the Monte-Carlo estimator is considered as the reference probability estimator. However, it is still untractable for real engineering cases since it requires a high number of runs of the model. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-19 V. Dubourg , F. Deheeger , B. Sudret

Sampling-based motion planning methods, while effective in high-dimensional spaces, often suffer from inefficiencies due to irregular sampling distributions, leading to suboptimal exploration of the configuration space. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Makram Chahine , T. Konstantin Rusch , Zach J. Patterson , Daniela Rus

In this work, we empirically explore the question: how can we assess the quality of samples from some target distribution? We assume that the samples are provided by some valid Monte Carlo procedure, so we are guaranteed that the collection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-21 Arjumand Masood , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez

In this paper, we investigate the impact of numerical instability on the reliability of sampling, density evaluation, and evidence lower bound (ELBO) estimation in variational flows. We first empirically demonstrate that common flows can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Zuheng Xu , Trevor Campbell

To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…

Computation · Statistics 2020-04-09 Lewis J. Rendell , Adam M. Johansen , Anthony Lee , Nick Whiteley