Related papers: Annealed Importance Sampling
We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…
Importance sampling is a popular method for efficient computation of various properties of a distribution such as probabilities, expectations, quantiles etc. The output of an importance sampling algorithm can be represented as a weighted…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) moves particles along a Markov chain from a tractable initial distribution to an intractable target distribution. The recently proposed Differentiable AIS (DAIS) (Geffner and Domke, 2021; Zhang et al.,…
The estimation of normalizing constants is a fundamental step in probabilistic model comparison. Sequential Monte Carlo methods may be used for this task and have the advantage of being inherently parallelizable. However, the standard…
We introduce an extension to annealed importance sampling that uses Hamiltonian dynamics to rapidly estimate normalization constants. We demonstrate this method by computing log likelihoods in directed and undirected probabilistic image…
Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) synthesizes weighted samples from an intractable distribution given its unnormalized density function. This algorithm relies on a sequence of interpolating distributions bridging the target to an initial…
Variational inference (VI) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) are two main approximate approaches for learning deep generative models by maximizing marginal likelihood. In this paper, we propose using annealed importance sampling for…
We introduce a generalization of the Adaptive Multilevel Splitting algorithm in the discrete time dynamic setting, namely when it is applied to sample rare events associated with paths of Markov chains. By interpreting the algorithm as a…
We consider the outstanding problem of sampling from an unnormalized density that may be non-log-concave and multimodal. To enhance the performance of simple Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, techniques of annealing type have been…
Adaptive importance sampling is a widely spread Monte Carlo technique that uses a re-weighting strategy to iteratively estimate the so-called target distribution. A major drawback of adaptive importance sampling is the large variance of the…
We introduce a new class of sequential Monte Carlo methods which reformulates the essence of the nested sampling method of Skilling (2006) in terms of sequential Monte Carlo techniques. Two new algorithms are proposed, nested sampling via…
Importance sampling is a widely used technique to estimate properties of a distribution. This paper investigates trading-off some bias for variance by adaptively winsorizing the importance sampling estimator. The novel winsorizing…
High-energy physics requires the generation of large numbers of simulated data samples from complex but analytically tractable distributions called matrix elements. Surrogate models, such as normalizing flows, are gaining popularity for…
Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models (GPLVMs) have become increasingly popular for unsupervised tasks such as dimensionality reduction and missing data recovery due to their flexibility and non-linear nature. An importance-weighted…
Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…
Slice sampling is a well-established Markov chain Monte Carlo method for (approximate) sampling of target distributions which are only known up to a normalizing constant. The method is based on choosing a new state on a slice, i.e., a…
We consider importance sampling as well as other properly weighted samples with respect to a target distribution $\pi$ from a different point of view. By considering the associated weights as sojourn times until the next jump, we define…
Given an unnormalized target distribution we want to obtain approximate samples from it and a tight lower bound on its (log) normalization constant log Z. Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) with Hamiltonian MCMC is a powerful method that…
The aim of this paper is to introduce a new Monte Carlo method based on importance sampling techniques for the simulation of stochastic differential equations. The main idea is to combine random walk on squares or rectangles methods with…
In this paper we examine quantile-stratified samples from a known univariate probability distribution, with stratification occurring over a partition of the quantile regions in the distribution. We examine some general properties of this…