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This paper proposes a new sampling-based nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) algorithm, with a bound on complexity quadratic in the prediction horizon N and linear in the number of samples. The idea of the proposed algorithm is to use…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-01-13 R. V. Bobiti , M. Lazar

We propose a sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) algorithm to sample from a sequence of probability distributions, corresponding to posterior distributions at different times in on-line applications. SMCMC proceeds as in usual MCMC…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-08-20 Yun Yang , David B. Dunson

Numerous capability and safety techniques of Large Language Models (LLMs), including RLHF, automated red-teaming, prompt engineering, and infilling, can be cast as sampling from an unnormalized target distribution defined by a given reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Stephen Zhao , Rob Brekelmans , Alireza Makhzani , Roger Grosse

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods comprise one of the most successful approaches to approximate Bayesian filtering. However, SMC without good proposal distributions struggle in high dimensions. We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo…

Computation · Statistics 2016-12-30 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön

This paper proposes a synergy of amortised and particle-based methods for sampling from distributions defined by unnormalised density functions. We state a connection between sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and neural sequential samplers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sanghyeok Choi , Sarthak Mittal , Víctor Elvira , Jinkyoo Park , Nikolay Malkin

Closed-form stochastic filtering equations can be derived in a general setting where probability distributions are replaced by some specific outer measures. In this article, we study how the principles of the sequential Monte Carlo method…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-05-07 Jeremie Houssineau , Branko Ristic

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as strong alternatives to autoregressive language models, matching their performance through large-scale training. However, inference-time control remains relatively underexplored. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Meihua Dang , Jiaqi Han , Minkai Xu , Kai Xu , Akash Srivastava , Stefano Ermon

Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often rely on heuristic strategies for parallel sampling, lacking a principled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Youkang Wang , Jian Wang , Rubing Chen , Xiao-Yong Wei

Discrete diffusion models have become highly effective across various domains. However, real-world applications often require the generative process to adhere to certain constraints. To this end, we propose a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zijing Ou , Chinmay Pani , Yingzhen Li

While recent work has shown that scores from models trained by the ubiquitous masked language modeling (MLM) objective effectively discriminate probable from improbable sequences, it is still an open question if these MLMs specify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Kartik Goyal , Chris Dyer , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

An efficient simulation-based methodology is proposed for the rolling window estimation of state space models, called particle rolling Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with double block sampling. In our method, which is based on Sequential…

Computation · Statistics 2021-09-17 Naoki Awaya , Yasuhiro Omori

Temporal point processes are powerful generative models for event sequences that capture complex dependencies in time-series data. They are commonly specified using autoregressive models that learn the distribution of the next event from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Marin Biloš , Anderson Schneider , Yuriy Nevmyvaka

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) is a common and increasingly significant way to refine the step-by-step reasoning of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In the multiple-choice setting - a dominant format for multimodal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Jiahao Wang , Weiye Xu , Aijun Yang , Wengang Zhou , Lewei Lu , Houqiang Li , Xiaohua Wang , Jinguo Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse downstream tasks. However, their autoregressive nature leads to substantial inference latency, posing challenges for real-time applications. Speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Tao He , Guang Huang , Yu Yang , Tianshi Xu , Sicheng Zhao , Guiguang Ding , Pengyang Wang , Feng Tian

Random sampling of graph partitions under constraints has become a popular tool for evaluating legislative redistricting plans. Analysts detect partisan gerrymandering by comparing a proposed redistricting plan with an ensemble of sampled…

Applications · Statistics 2023-11-09 Cory McCartan , Kosuke Imai

This paper concerns the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods (SMC) for smoothing in general state space models. A well-known problem when applying the standard SMC technique in the smoothing mode is that the resampling mechanism introduces…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-03-06 Jimmy Olsson , Olivier Cappé , Randal Douc , Eric Moulines

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-11-15 Matthias Morzfeld , Marcus S. Day , Ray W. Grout , George Shu Heng Pau , Stefan A. Finsterle , John B. Bell

SMC (Sequential Monte Carlo) is a class of Monte Carlo algorithms for filtering and related sequential problems. Gerber and Chopin (2015) introduced SQMC (Sequential quasi-Monte Carlo), a QMC version of SMC. This paper has two objectives:…

Computation · Statistics 2017-06-19 Nicolas Chopin , Mathieu Gerber

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are widely used to draw samples from intractable target distributions. Particle degeneracy can hinder the use of SMC when the target distribution is highly constrained or multimodal. As a motivating…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-26 Zhaoran Hou , Samuel W. K. Wong

We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate,…

Computation · Statistics 2015-09-14 Christian A. Naesseth , Fredrik Lindsten , Thomas B. Schön