Related papers: Efficiently learning and sampling multimodal distr…
Markov chains can be used to generate samples whose distribution approximates a given target distribution. The quality of the samples of such Markov chains can be measured by the discrepancy between the empirical distribution of the samples…
This paper aims at improving the convergence to equilibrium of finite ergodic Markov chains via permutations and projections. First, we prove that a specific mixture of permuted Markov chains arises naturally as a projection under the KL…
Simulated annealing - moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions - has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers.…
In this work, we study a natural nonparametric estimator of the transition probability matrices of a finite controlled Markov chain. We consider an offline setting with a fixed dataset, collected using a so-called logging policy. We develop…
The present paper focuses on the problem of sampling from a given target distribution $\pi$ defined on some general state space. To this end, we introduce a novel class of non-reversible Markov chains, each chain being defined on an…
Markov chains are convenient means of generating realizations of networks with a given (joint or otherwise) degree distribution, since they simply require a procedure for rewiring edges. The major challenge is to find the right number of…
Fast distributed algorithms that output a feasible solution for constraint satisfaction problems, such as maximal independent sets, have been heavily studied. There has been much less research on distributed sampling problems, where one…
We consider the averaging principle for deterministic or stochastic systems with a fast stochastic component (family of continuous-time Markov chains depending on the state of the system as a parameter). We show that, due to bifurcations in…
The Ising model is a celebrated example of a Markov random field, introduced in statistical physics to model ferromagnetism. This is a discrete exponential family with binary outcomes, where the sufficient statistic involves a quadratic…
In networking applications, one often wishes to obtain estimates about the number of objects at different parts of the network (e.g., the number of cars at an intersection of a road network or the number of packets expected to reach a node…
Training models that perform well under distribution shifts is a central challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a modeling framework where, in addition to training data, we have partial structural knowledge of the…
Given samples from an unknown multivariate distribution $p$, is it possible to distinguish whether $p$ is the product of its marginals versus $p$ being far from every product distribution? Similarly, is it possible to distinguish whether…
Strongly Rayleigh distributions are natural generalizations of product and determinantal probability distributions and satisfy strongest form of negative dependence properties. We show that the "natural" Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) is…
In this paper, we propose a simple, versatile model for learning the structure and parameters of multivariate distributions from a data set. Learning a Markov network from a given data set is not a simple problem, because Markov networks…
We develop diffusion-based samplers for target distributions known up to a normalising constant. To this end, we rely on the well-known diffusion path that smoothly interpolates between a simple base distribution and the target, popularised…
Sampling from Gibbs distribution is a central problem in computer science as well as in statistical physics. In this work we focus on the k-colouring model} and the hard-core model with fugacity \lambda when the underlying graph is an…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning multi-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), with a specific focus on model order selection and efficient mixing distribution estimation. We first establish an information-theoretic lower…
For general spin systems, we prove that a contractive coupling for any local Markov chain implies optimal bounds on the mixing time and the modified log-Sobolev constant for a large class of Markov chains including the Glauber dynamics,…
We propose to model the image differentials of astrophysical source maps by Student's t-distribution and to use them in the Bayesian source separation method as priors. We introduce an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling…
We introduce a theoretical framework for sampling from unnormalized densities based on a smoothing scheme that uses an isotropic Gaussian kernel with a single fixed noise scale. We prove one can decompose sampling from a density (minimal…