Related papers: Estimating the Probabilities of Rare Outputs in La…
Driven by applications in telecommunication networks, we explore the simulation task of estimating rare event probabilities for tandem queues in their steady state. Existing literature has recognized that importance sampling methods can be…
Importance sampling is a well developed method in statistics. Given a random variable $X$, the problem of estimating its expected value $\mu$ is addressed. The standard approach is to use the sample mean as an estimator $\bar x$. In…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…
In Bayesian optimization, accounting for the importance of the output relative to the input is a crucial yet challenging exercise, as it can considerably improve the final result but often involves inaccurate and cumbersome entropy…
We consider the problem of choosing design parameters to minimize the probability of an undesired rare event that is described through the average of $n$ iid random variables. Since the probability of interest for near optimal design…
In this paper, we propose an efficient importance sampling algorithm for rare event simulation under copula models. In the algorithm, the derived optimal probability measure is based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of the…
Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…
A fundamental characteristic of natural language is the high rate at which speakers produce novel expressions. Because of this novelty, a heavy-tail of rare events accounts for a significant amount of the total probability mass of…
This paper proposes niching importance sampling, a framework that combines concepts from reliability analysis, e.g. Markov chains, importance sampling, and relative cross entropy minimisation, with niching techniques from evolutionary…
This paper considers importance sampling for estimation of rare-event probabilities in a specific collection of Markovian jump processes used for e.g. modelling of credit risk. Previous attempts at designing importance sampling algorithms…
In this paper, we consider an importance sampling problem for a certain rare-event simulations involving the behavior of a diffusion process pertaining to a chain of distributed systems with random perturbations. We also assume that the…
An important step in the design of autonomous systems is to evaluate the probability that a failure will occur. In safety-critical domains, the failure probability is extremely small so that the evaluation of a policy through Monte Carlo…
Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the…
Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically…
Despite empirical risk minimization (ERM) is widely applied in the machine learning community, its performance is limited on data with spurious correlation or subpopulation that is introduced by hidden attributes. Existing literature…
Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…
A learned generative model often produces biased statistics relative to the underlying data distribution. A standard technique to correct this bias is importance sampling, where samples from the model are weighted by the likelihood ratio…
Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying…
In this work we investigate to which extent one can recover class probabilities within the empirical risk minimization (ERM) paradigm. The main aim of our paper is to extend existing results and emphasize the tight relations between…
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated based on data…