Related papers: Accelerated Parallel Tempering via Neural Transpor…
Modern parallel computing devices, such as the graphics processing unit (GPU), have gained significant traction in scientific and statistical computing. They are particularly well-suited to data-parallel algorithms such as the particle…
Sampling from multimodal distributions is a challenging task in scientific computing. When a distribution has an exact symmetry between the modes, direct jumps among them can accelerate the samplings significantly. However, the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful method for drawing samples from non-standard probability distributions and is utilized across many fields and disciplines. Methods such as Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin (MALA) and Hamiltonian…
The method of tempered transitions was proposed by Neal (1996) for tackling the difficulties arising when using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from multimodal distributions. In common with methods such as simulated tempering and…
We introduce a new Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach designed for efficient sampling of highly correlated and multimodal posteriors. Parallel tempering, though effective, is a costly technique for sampling such posteriors. Our…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
In this article we propose a novel MCMC method based on deterministic transformations T: X x D --> X where X is the state-space and D is some set which may or may not be a subset of X. We refer to our new methodology as Transformation-based…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are indispensable when sampling from a complex, high-dimensional distribution by a conventional method is intractable. Even though MCMC is a powerful tool, it is also hard to control and tune in…
This paper presents two conceptually simple methods for parallelizing a Parallel Tempering Monte Carlo simulation in a distributed volunteer computing context, where computers belonging to the general public are used. The first method uses…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from a given distribution of interest, whenever either the distribution does not exist in closed form, or, if it does, no efficient method to simulate an independent sample from…
We introduce Preconditioned Monte Carlo (PMC), a novel Monte Carlo method for Bayesian inference that facilitates efficient sampling of probability distributions with non-trivial geometry. PMC utilises a Normalising Flow (NF) in order to…
In this paper we demonstrate that tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers for Bayesian models by recursively subsampling observations without replacement can improve the performance of baseline samplers in terms of effective sample size…
Multimodal structures in the sampling density (e.g. two competing phases) can be a serious problem for traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), because correct sampling of the different structures can only be guaranteed for infinite…
Efficient sampling of two-dimensional statistical physics systems remains a central challenge in computational statistical physics. Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, including cluster algorithms, provide only partial…
We propose a sampling-based framework for finite-horizon trajectory and policy optimization under differentiable dynamics by casting controller design as inference. Specifically, we minimize a KL-regularized expected trajectory cost, which…
In many hierarchical inverse problems, not only do we want to estimate high- or infinite-dimensional model parameters in the parameter-to-observable maps, but we also have to estimate hyperparameters that represent critical assumptions in…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a promising framework for modeling predictive uncertainty and enhancing out-of-distribution robustness (OOD) by estimating the posterior distribution of network parameters. Stochastic Gradient Markov…
A new class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, based on simulating piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs), have recently shown great promise: they are non-reversible, can mix better than standard MCMC algorithms, and…