A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
This paper studies a curious phenomenon in learning energy-based model (EBM) using MCMC. In each learning iteration, we generate synthesized examples by running a non-convergent, non-mixing, and non-persistent short-run MCMC toward the current model, always starting from the same initial distribution such as uniform no…
Recent advances in Bayesian learning with large-scale data have witnessed emergence of stochastic gradient MCMC algorithms (SG-MCMC), such as stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), stochastic gradient Hamiltonian MCMC (SGHMC), and the stochastic gradient thermostat. While finite-time convergence properties of th…
It is known that the Langevin dynamics used in MCMC is the gradient flow of the KL divergence on the Wasserstein space, which helps convergence analysis and inspires recent particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs). But no more MCMC dynamics is understood in this way. In this work, by developing novel conce…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been developed as a flexible family of scalable Bayesian sampling algorithms. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of the impact of minibatch size to the algorithm's convergence rate. In this paper, we prove that under a limited computational bud…
Normalized random measures (NRMs) provide a broad class of discrete random measures that are often used as priors for Bayesian nonparametric models. Dirichlet process is a well-known example of NRMs. Most of posterior inference methods for NRM mixture models rely on MCMC methods since they are easy to implement and the…
Stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) has played an important role in large-scale Bayesian learning, with well-developed theoretical convergence properties. In such applications of SG-MCMC, it is becoming increasingly popular to employ distributed systems, where stochastic gradients are computed based on some outdated par…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods such as Gibbs sampling are finding widespread use in applied statistics and machine learning. These often lead to difficult computational problems, which are increasingly being solved on parallel and distributed systems such as compute clusters. Recent work has proposed running i…
AMAGOLD improves stochastic gradient MCMC by infrequent Metropolis-Hastings corrections.
problem Bias in stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (SGHMC).
method AMAGOLD infrequently uses Metropolis-Hastings corrections to remove bias, with a fixed step size schedule.
result AMAGOLD converges to the target distribution with a fixed, rather than a diminishing, step size, and at most a constant factor slower convergence rate.
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such challenges culminate to lack of convergence to the parameter posterior. Nevertheless, thi…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with limitations in practice: MCMC methods can be computationally demanding; VI methods …
The posteriors over neural network weights are high dimensional and multimodal. Each mode typically characterizes a meaningfully different representation of the data. We develop Cyclical Stochastic Gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) to automatically explore such distributions. In particular, we propose a cyclical stepsize schedul…
Acyclic digraphs are the underlying representation of Bayesian networks, a widely used class of probabilistic graphical models. Learning the underlying graph from data is a way of gaining insights about the structural properties of a domain. Structure learning forms one of the inference challenges of statistical graphi…
Recent works have derived non-asymptotic upper bounds for convergence of underdamped Langevin MCMC. We revisit these bound and consider introducing scaling terms in the underlying underdamped Langevin equation. In particular, we provide conditions under which an appropriate scaling allows to improve the error bounds in…
Split-Merge MCMC (Monte Carlo Markov Chain) is one of the essential and popular variants of MCMC for problems when an MCMC state consists of an unknown number of components. It is well known that state-of-the-art methods for split-merge MCMC do not scale well. Strategies for rapid mixing requires smart and informative …
Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we explore this idea using steps of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm, an e…
We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly because this approximation tends to underestimate the true variance and other features…