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This simple note lays out a few observations which are well known in many ways but may not have been said in quite this way before. The basic idea is that when comparing two different Markov chains it is useful to couple them is such a way…
To estimate the smoothing distribution in a nonlinear state space model, we apply the conditional particle filter with ancestor sampling. This gives an iterative algorithm in a Markov chain Monte Carlo fashion, with asymptotic convergence…
Spin-glasses are Gibbs distributions that have been studied in CS for many decades. Recently, they have gained renewed attention as they emerge naturally in learning, inference, optimisation etc. We consider the Edwards-Anderson (EA)…
Slow mixing is the central hurdle when working with Markov chains, especially those used for Monte Carlo approximations (MCMC). In many applications, it is only of interest to estimate the stationary expectations of a small set of…
Glassy behavior is one of the main open problems in condensed matter physics. In this thesis, we approach the problem by studying spin-glasses and colloids, using several complementary strategies. From the point of view of model building,…
We consider Ising models on the hypercube with a general interaction matrix $J$, and give a polynomial time sampling algorithm when all but $O(1)$ eigenvalues of $J$ lie in an interval of length one, a situation which occurs in many models…
We present a simple algorithm that perfectly samples configurations from the unique Gibbs measure of a spin system on a potentially infinite graph $G$. The sampling algorithm assumes strong spatial mixing together with subexponential growth…
We derive entropy factorization estimates for spin systems using the stochastic localization approach proposed by Eldan and Chen-Eldan, which, in this context, is equivalent to the renormalization group approach developed independently by…
A local-valley (LV) centered approach to assessing the quality of sampling from Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) was applied to the latest generation of the D-Wave quantum annealer. D-Wave and Gibbs samples from a classically trained…
We investigate the computational hardness of spin-glass instances on a square lattice, generated via a recently introduced tunable and scalable approach for planting solutions. The method relies on partitioning the problem graph into…
The core idea of stochastic stability is that thermodynamic observables must be robust under small (random) perturbations of the quenched Gibbs measure. Combining this idea with the cavity field technique, which aims to measure the free…
This paper considers stochastic-constrained stochastic optimization where the stochastic constraint is to satisfy that the expectation of a random function is below a certain threshold. In particular, we study the setting where data samples…
Probabilistic models are conceptually powerful tools for finding structure in data, but their practical effectiveness is often limited by our ability to perform inference in them. Exact inference is frequently intractable, so approximate…
The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
We propose a new algorithm to do posterior sampling of Kingman's coalescent, based upon the Particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo methodology. Specifically, the algorithm is an instantiation of the Particle Gibbs Sampling method, which…
Many stochastic time series can be described by a Langevin equation composed of a deterministic and a stochastic dynamical part. Such a stochastic process can be reconstructed by means of a recently introduced nonparametric method, thus…
Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…
Population annealing is a powerful sequential Monte Carlo algorithm designed to study the equilibrium behavior of general systems in statistical physics through massive parallelism. In addition to the remarkable scaling capabilities of the…
Completely random measures provide a principled approach to creating flexible unsupervised models, where the number of latent features is infinite and the number of features that influence the data grows with the size of the data set. Due…