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Parallel tempering, also known as replica exchange sampling, is an important method for simulating complex systems. In this algorithm simulations are conducted in parallel at a series of temperatures, and the key feature of the algorithm is…

Probability · Mathematics 2012-06-14 Paul Dupuis , Yufei Liu , Nuria Plattner , J. D. Doll

Parallel tempering (PT) methods are a popular class of Markov chain Monte Carlo schemes used to sample complex high-dimensional probability distributions. They rely on a collection of $N$ interacting auxiliary chains targeting tempered…

Computation · Statistics 2021-07-28 Saifuddin Syed , Alexandre Bouchard-Côté , George Deligiannidis , Arnaud Doucet

Langevin diffusion is a powerful method for nonconvex optimization, which enables the escape from local minima by injecting noise into the gradient. In particular, the temperature parameter controlling the noise level gives rise to a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-07 Yi Chen , Jinglin Chen , Jing Dong , Jian Peng , Zhaoran Wang

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Paul Fearnhead , Sebastiano Grazzi , Chris Nemeth , Gareth O. Roberts

Sampling Boltzmann probability distributions plays a key role in machine learning and optimization, motivating the design of hardware accelerators such as Ising machines. While the Ising model can in principle encode arbitrary optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Corentin Delacour , M Mahmudul Hasan Sajeeb , Joao P. Hespanha , Kerem Y. Camsari

Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions is a fundamental challenge in computational physics and machine learning. While score-based and variational methods have achieved success in continuous domains, extending them to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Lei Li , Zhen Wang , Lishuo Zhang

Sampling from discrete distributions is a ubiquitous task in machine learning, recently revisited by the emergence of discrete diffusion models. While Langevin algorithms constitute the state of the art for continuous spaces, discrete…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Armand Gissler , Saeed Saremi , Francis Bach

Stochastic gradients have been widely integrated into Langevin-based methods to improve their scalability and efficiency in solving large-scale sampling problems. However, the proximal sampler, which exhibits much faster convergence than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Xunpeng Huang , Difan Zou , Yi-An Ma , Hanze Dong , Tong Zhang

Langevin dynamics sampling suffers from extremely low generation speed, fundamentally limited by numerous fine-grained iterations to converge to the target distribution. We introduce PID-controlled Langevin Dynamics (PIDLD), a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Hongyi Chen , Jianhai Shu , Jingtao Ding , Yong Li , Xiao-Ping Zhang

The problem of sampling a target probability distribution on a constrained domain arises in many applications including machine learning. For constrained sampling, various Langevin algorithms such as projected Langevin Monte Carlo (PLMC),…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-07 Yingli Wang , Changwei Tu , Xiaoyu Wang , Lingjiong Zhu

Sampling the parameter space of artificial neural networks according to a Boltzmann distribution provides insight into the geometry of low-loss solutions and offers an alternative to conventional loss minimization for training. However,…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-03-17 Alessandro Zambon , Francesca Caruso , Riccardo Zecchina , Guido Tiana

In the current work we present two generalizations of the Parallel Tempering algorithm, inspired by the so-called continuous-time Infinite Swapping algorithm. Such a method, found its origins in the molecular dynamics community, and can be…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-10-13 Jonas Latz , Juan P. Madrigal-Cianci , Fabio Nobile , Raul Tempone

Simulated and parallel tempering are families of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms where a temperature parameter is varied during the simulation to overcome bottlenecks to convergence due to multimodality. In this work we introduce and…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-07-20 Nayantara Bhatnagar , Dana Randall

Geometric tempering is a popular approach to sampling from challenging multi-modal probability distributions by instead sampling from a sequence of distributions which interpolate, using the geometric mean, between an easier proposal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-09 Omar Chehab , Anna Korba , Austin Stromme , Adrien Vacher

In this work, we propose a first-order sampling method called the Metropolis-adjusted Preconditioned Langevin Algorithm for approximate sampling from a target distribution whose support is a proper convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Our…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-27 Vishwak Srinivasan , Andre Wibisono , Ashia Wilson

Discrete distributions, particularly in high-dimensional deep models, are often highly multimodal due to inherent discontinuities. While gradient-based discrete sampling has proven effective, it is susceptible to becoming trapped in local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Patrick Pynadath , Riddhiman Bhattacharya , Arun Hariharan , Ruqi Zhang

Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are algorithms used to sample probability distributions, commonly used to sample the Boltzmann distribution of physical/chemical models (e.g., protein folding, Ising model, etc.). This allows us to study…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Aingeru Ramos , Jose A Pascual , Javier Navaridas , Ivan Coluzza

Sampling from high-dimensional distributions is a fundamental problem in statistical research and practice. However, great challenges emerge when the target density function is unnormalized and contains isolated modes. We tackle this…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-11 Yixuan Qiu , Xiao Wang

Bayesian methods of sampling from a posterior distribution are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to precisely display the uncertainty of a model fit. Classical methods based on iterative random sampling and posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-04 Jacopo Guidolin , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Ondřej Kuželka

Discrete diffusion models (DDMs) have shown powerful generation ability for discrete data modalities like text and molecules. However, their practical application is hindered by inefficient sampling, requiring a large number of sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Feiyang Fu , Tongxian Guo , Zhaoqiang Liu