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In this paper we present a new approach to control variates for improving computational efficiency of Ensemble Monte Carlo. We present the approach using simulation of paths of a time-dependent nonlinear stochastic equation. The core idea…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent acts in an unknown environment to maximize the expected cumulative discounted sum of an external reward signal, i.e., the expected return. In practice, in many tasks of interest, such as policy…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…
In this article we consider the approximation of expectations w.r.t. probability distributions associated to the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs); this scenario appears routinely in Bayesian inverse problems. In practice,…
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…
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…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling methods provide a mechanism for defining distant proposals with high acceptance probabilities in a Metropolis-Hastings framework, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space than standard…
Variational inference often minimizes the "reverse" Kullbeck-Leibler (KL) KL(q||p) from the approximate distribution q to the posterior p. Recent work studies the "forward" KL KL(p||q), which unlike reverse KL does not lead to variational…
Most of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms in existing probabilistic programming systems suboptimally use only model priors as proposal distributions. In this work, we describe an approach for…
In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…
A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…
The performance of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers heavily depends on the tuning of the Markov kernels used in the path proposal. For SMC samplers with unadjusted Markov kernels, standard tuning objectives, such as the…
Adaptive Monte Carlo methods are very efficient techniques designed to tune simulation estimators on-line. In this work, we present an alternative to stochastic approximation to tune the optimal change of measure in the context of…
Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has driven many recent breakthroughs in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, scaling MCTS to parallel compute has proven challenging in practice which has motivated alternative planners like sequential…
This paper introduces methodology for performing Bayesian inference sequentially on a sequence of posteriors on spaces of different dimensions. We show how this may be achieved through the use of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers (Del…
We propose a splitting Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (SHMC) algorithm, which can be computationally efficient when combined with the random mini-batch strategy. By splitting the potential energy into numerically nonstiff and stiff parts, one…
We introduce an extension of the time-dependent variational Monte Carlo (tVMC) method that adaptively controls the expressivity of the variational quantum state during the simulation of the dynamics. This adaptive tVMC (atVMC) approach is…
We consider a class of finite time horizon nonlinear stochastic optimal control problem, where the control acts additively on the dynamics and the control cost is quadratic. This framework is flexible and has found applications in many…
We propose a new framework for how to use sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms for inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGM). Via a sequential decomposition of the PGM we find a sequence of auxiliary distributions defined on a…
We present a hybrid method for time-dependent particle transport that combines Monte Carlo (MC) estimation with a deterministic discrete ordinates (\(S_N\)) solve, augmented by quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling. For spatial discretizations,…