Related papers: Policy Gradients for Optimal Parallel Tempering MC…
We study the applicability of the {\it parallel tempering method} (PT) in the investigation of first- order phase transitions. In this method, replicas of the same system are simulated simultaneously at different temperatures and the…
Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian posterior inference is a common approach used in machine learning. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures that are used are often discrete-time analogues of associated stochastic differential equations…
Filtering---estimating the state of a partially observable Markov process from a sequence of observations---is one of the most widely studied problems in control theory, AI, and computational statistics. Exact computation of the posterior…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is an important and commonly used tool for the analysis of hierarchical models. Nevertheless, practitioners generally have two options for MCMC: utilize existing software that generates a black-box…
Many recent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers leverage continuous dynamics to define a transition kernel that efficiently explores a target distribution. In tandem, a focus has been on devising scalable variants that subsample the…
We introduce a new update scheme to systematically improve the efficiency of parallel tempering simulations. We show that by adapting the number of sweeps between replica exchanges to the canonical autocorrelation time, the average…
Multiproposal MCMC (MP-MCMC) algorithms use clouds of proposals to efficiently traverse state spaces and overcome complex target geometries. While MCMC methods are embarrassingly parallel by nature, the non-trivial forms of parallelism…
This paper presents a systematic method for the selection of the Model Predictive Control (MPC) stage cost. We match the MPC feedback law to a proportional-integral (PI) controller, which we efficiently tune by high-performance Monte Carlo…
We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…
We propose a new strategy for Monte Carlo (MC) optimization on rugged multidimensional landscapes. The strategy is based on querying the statistical properties of the landscape in order to find the temperature at which the mean first…
Data assimilation algorithms integrate prior information from numerical model simulations with observed data. Ensemble-based filters, regarded as state-of-the-art, are widely employed for large-scale estimation tasks in disciplines such as…
Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…
Temperature scaling is a popular technique for tuning the sharpness of a model distribution. It is used extensively for sampling likely generations and calibrating model uncertainty, and even features as a controllable parameter to many…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for drawing samples from smooth probability densities over continuous spaces. We study the variant most widely used in practice, Metropolized…
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.…
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…
A sequential trajectory linearized adaptive model based predictive controller is designed using the DMC algorithm to control the temperature of a batch MMA polymerization process. Using the mechanistic model of the polymerization, a…
Geometric tempering is a popular approach to sampling from challenging multi-modal probability distributions by instead sampling from a sequence of distributions which interpolate, using the geometric mean, between an easier proposal…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a popular class of statistical methods for simulating autocorrelated draws from target distributions, including posterior distributions in Bayesian analysis. An important consideration in using simulated…
Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) algorithms, such as model predictive path integral (MPPI), enable approximate, gradient-free solutions to optimal control problems by drawing samples from a proposal distribution, evaluating…