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Sampling from the lattice Gaussian distribution plays an important role in various research fields. In this paper, the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based sampling technique is advanced in several fronts. Firstly, the spectral gap for the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-31 Zheng Wang , Cong Ling

We introduce Projected Latent Markov Chain Monte Carlo (PL-MCMC), a technique for sampling from the high-dimensional conditional distributions learned by a normalizing flow. We prove that a Metropolis-Hastings implementation of PL-MCMC…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Chris Cannella , Mohammadreza Soltani , Vahid Tarokh

This paper considers a new approach to using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in contexts where one may adopt multilevel (ML) Monte Carlo. The underlying problem is to approximate expectations w.r.t. an underlying probability measure that is…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-06-27 Ajay Jasra , Kody Law , Yaxian Xu

Generating diverse samples under hard constraints is a core challenge in many areas. With this work we aim to provide an integrative view and framework to combine methods from the fields of MCMC, constrained optimization, as well as…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Marc Toussaint , Cornelius V. Braun , Joaquim Ortiz-Haro

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are routinely used to draw samples from distributions with intractable normalization constants. However, standard MCMC algorithms do not apply to doubly-intractable distributions in which there are…

Computation · Statistics 2012-07-02 Iain Murray , Zoubin Ghahramani , David MacKay

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods sample from unnormalized probability distributions and offer guarantees of exact sampling. However, in the continuous case, unfavorable geometry of the target distribution can greatly limit the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-09 Zengyi Li , Yubei Chen , Friedrich T. Sommer

Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-16 Conor Rosato , Harvinder Lehal , Simon Maskell , Lee Devlin , Malcolm Strens

Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…

Computation · Statistics 2024-04-01 Riddhiman Bhattacharya , Tiefeng Jiang

In lattice quantum field theory studies, parameters defining the lattice theory must be tuned toward criticality to access continuum physics. Commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods suffer from critical slowing down in this…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2021-06-04 Gurtej Kanwar

We discuss a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) procedure for the random sampling of some one-dimensional lattice paths with constraints, for various constraints. We show that an approach inspired by optimal transport allows us to bound…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-07-28 Lucas Gerin

Recent papers have demonstrated the possibility of energy-based text generation by adapting gradient-based sampling algorithms, a paradigm of MCMC algorithms that promises fast convergence. However, as we show in this paper, previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Li Du , Afra Amini , Lucas Torroba Hennigen , Xinyan Velocity Yu , Jason Eisner , Holden Lee , Ryan Cotterell

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods asymptotically sample from complex probability distributions. The pseudo-marginal MCMC framework only requires an unbiased estimator of the unnormalized probability distribution function to construct…

Computation · Statistics 2016-05-25 Iain Murray , Matthew M. Graham

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate executable outputs, JSON objects, and API calls, where a single syntax error can make the output unusable. Constrained decoding enforces validity token-by-token via masking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Avinash Reddy , Thayne T. Walker , James S. Ide , Amrit Singh Bedi

A wide range of LM applications require generating text that conforms to syntactic or semantic constraints. Imposing such constraints can be naturally framed as probabilistic conditioning, but exact generation from the resulting…

We introduce a principled probabilistic framework for reward-guided decoding in large language models, addressing the limitations of standard decoding methods that optimize token-level likelihood rather than sequence-level quality. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jelena Markovic-Voronov , Wenhui Zhu , Bo Long , Zhipeng Wang , Suyash Gupta , Kayhan Behdin , Bee-Chung Chen , Deepak Agarwal

Large pretrained language models generate fluent text but are notoriously hard to controllably sample from. In this work, we study constrained sampling from such language models: generating text that satisfies user-defined constraints,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Sachin Kumar , Biswajit Paria , Yulia Tsvetkov

We study the computational complexity of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression under sparsity constraints. We first show that a Bayesian approach can achieve variable-selection consistency…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-01 Yun Yang , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are widely used in machine learning. One of the major problems with MCMC is the question of how to design chains that mix fast over the whole state space; in particular, how to select the parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Kiarash Shaloudegi , András György

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a popular technique in Bayesian statistical modeling. They have long been used to obtain samples from posterior distributions, but recent research has focused on the scalability of these…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-02-02 Nicholas A. Johnson , Frank O. Kuehnel , Ali Nasiri Amini

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Minghao Gu , Shiliang Sun