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Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are an important class of time-series models, used to describe stochastic systems evolving in continuous time. Simulating paths from these processes, particularly after conditioning on noisy…
Recent studies on diffusion-based sampling methods have shown that Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithms can be beneficial for non-convex optimization, and rigorous theoretical guarantees have been proven for both asymptotic and finite-time…
Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have become standard tools in statistics to sample from complex probability measures. Many available techniques rely on discrete-time reversible Markov chains whose transition kernels build up over the…
Sequential Monte Carlo techniques are useful for state estimation in non-linear, non-Gaussian dynamic models. These methods allow us to approximate the joint posterior distribution using sequential importance sampling. In this framework,…
Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods with additive noise. They have been used for decades in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and learning. Their convergence properties for unconstrained non-convex…
We propose a new Monte Carlo method for sampling from multimodal distributions. The idea of this technique is based on splitting the task into two: finding the modes of a target distribution $\pi$ and sampling, given the knowledge of the…
We introduce a general Monte Carlo method based on Nested Sampling (NS), for sampling complex probability distributions and estimating the normalising constant. The method uses one or more particles, which explore a mixture of nested…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that in…
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…
While gradient-based discrete samplers are effective in sampling from complex distributions, they are susceptible to getting trapped in local minima, particularly in high-dimensional, multimodal discrete distributions, owing to the…
It is of significant interest in many applications to sample from a high-dimensional target distribution $\pi$ with the density $\pi(\text{d} x) \propto e^{-U(x)} (\text{d} x) $, based on the temporal discretization of the Langevin…
Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…
Bayesian deep learning offers a principled way to address many issues concerning safety of artificial intelligence (AI), such as model uncertainty,model interpretability, and prediction bias. However, due to the lack of efficient Monte…
It is known that gradient-based MCMC samplers for continuous spaces, such as Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), can be derived as particle versions of a gradient flow that minimizes KL divergence on a Wasserstein manifold. The superior efficiency…
We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is a widely used algorithm for sampling from posterior distributions of complex Bayesian models. It can efficiently explore high-dimensional parameter spaces guided by simulated Hamiltonian flows. However, the…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a general mathematical model for sequential decision-making in stochastic environments under state uncertainty. POMDPs are often solved \textit{online}, which enables the algorithm…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have existed for a long time and the field is well-explored. The purpose of MCMC methods is to approximate a distribution through repeated sampling; most MCMC algorithms exhibit asymptotically optimal…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has become increasingly popular for simulating posterior samples in large-scale Bayesian modeling. However, existing SG-MCMC schemes are not tailored to any specific probabilistic…
We design and implement a novel algorithm for computing a multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator of the cumulative distribution function of a quantity of interest in problems with random input parameters or initial conditions. Our approach…