Related papers: LITE: Efficiently Estimating Gaussian Probability …

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has been widely used to efficiently optimize expensive black-box functions with limited evaluations. In this paper, we investigate the use of BO for prompt engineering to enhance text classification with Large…

Gaussian process (GP) based Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions efficiently. The practical performance and theoretical guarantees of this approach depend on having the correct GP hyperparameter…

In Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) the most commonly studied inference task is to compute the marginal probability of a query given a program. In this paper, we consider two other important tasks in the PLP setting: the…

The L1-regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) has been shown to have strong statistical guarantees in recovering a sparse inverse covariance matrix, or alternatively the underlying graph structure of a Gaussian Markov…

Practitioners building classifiers often start with a smaller pilot dataset and plan to grow to larger data in the near future. Such projects need a toolkit for extrapolating how much classifier accuracy may improve from a 2x, 10x, or 50x…

Likelihood-free (a.k.a. simulation-based) inference problems are inverse problems with expensive, or intractable, forward models. ODE inverse problems are commonly treated as likelihood-free, as their forward map has to be numerically…

We consider the problem of sequentially maximising an unknown function over a set of actions while ensuring that every sampled point has a function value below a given safety threshold. We model the function using kernel-based and Gaussian…

We consider the problem of estimating a probability distribution that maximizes the entropy while satisfying a finite number of moment constraints, possibly corrupted by noise. Based on duality of convex programming, we present a novel…

Training the parameters of statistical models to describe a given data set is a central task in the field of data mining and machine learning. A very popular and powerful way of parameter estimation is the method of maximum likelihood…

Maximizing high-dimensional, non-convex functions through noisy observations is a notoriously hard problem, but one that arises in many applications. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by modeling the unknown function as a sample from…

Maximum likelihood estimation is an important statistical technique for estimating missing data, for example in climate and environmental applications, which are usually large and feature data points that are irregularly spaced. In…

In this paper we develop a theory of matrix completion for the extreme case of noisy 1-bit observations. Instead of observing a subset of the real-valued entries of a matrix M, we obtain a small number of binary (1-bit) measurements…

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm has been predominantly used to approximate the maximum likelihood estimation of the location-scale Gaussian mixtures. However, when the models are over-specified, namely, the chosen number of…

The high cost and data scarcity in scientific exploration have motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven components in Bayesian optimization (BO). However, existing approaches typically embed LLMs directly into…

Likelihood functions evaluated using particle filters are typically noisy, computationally expensive, and non-differentiable due to Monte Carlo variability. These characteristics make conventional optimization methods difficult to apply…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular, sample-efficient technique for expensive, black-box optimization. One such problem arising in manufacturing is that of maximizing the reliability, or equivalently minimizing the probability of a…

Generalized linear mixed models are useful in studying hierarchical data with possibly non-Gaussian responses. However, the intractability of likelihood functions poses challenges for estimation. We develop a new method suitable for this…

We consider the problem of computing a positive definite $p \times p$ inverse covariance matrix aka precision matrix $\theta=(\theta_{ij})$ which optimizes a regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood problem, with the elastic-net regularizer…

Maximum likelihood estimation is one of the most used methods in quantum state tomography, where the aim is to reconstruct the density matrix of a physical system from measurement results. One strategy to deal with positivity and unit trace…