Paper improves Gumbel-Softmax estimator variance reduction.
problem Challenges in gradient estimation for models with discrete latent variables.
method Rao-Blackwellization applied to straight-through Gumbel-Softmax estimator.
result Reduces mean squared error and variance of Gumbel-Softmax estimator.
Derives new equations for stochastic volatility models.
problem Modeling local-stochastic-volatility models and their derivatives.
method Conditional forward equation, Dupire stochastic PDE, rolling expiry vanilla option SPDE.
result New equations for LSV models and their derivatives.
Proposes a method to stabilize Black Box Variational Inference using the James-Stein estimator.
problem Stability issues and fine-tuning required in basic Black Box Variational Inference.
method Reframe stochastic gradient ascent as multivariate estimation problem using James-Stein estimator.
result Provides a simpler method with consistent performance in terms of model fit and convergence time.
We wish to compute the gradient of an expectation over a finite or countably infinite sample space having K≤∞ categories. When K is indeed infinite, or finite but very large, the relevant summation is intractable. Accordingly, various stochastic gradient estimators have been proposed. In this paper, we de…
New estimator reduces variance in discrete random variables.
problem Estimating gradients for discrete random variables with reduced variance.
method Sampling without replacement and Rao-Blackwellization.
result Our estimator is the most consistent gradient estimator across different entropy settings.
New sampler reduces MCMC complexity for Bayesian variable selection.
problem High-dimensional Bayesian variable selection with high computation complexity.
method Variable-complexity subset weighted-Tempered Gibbs Sampler (wTGS) with Rao-Blackwellized estimator.
result Variances of Rao-Blackwellized estimator are smaller than those of subset wTGS.
A new variational method for SSMs improves inference efficiency.
problem Hard variational inference for state space models.
method Proposes variational marginal particle filter (VMPF) based on Rao-Blackwellization.
result VMPF provides tighter variational bounds and sometimes benefits from unbiased reparameterization.
Improves survey sampling with unbiased machine learning methods.
problem Design-consistent model-assisted estimation lacks a general theory for machine learning.
method Proposes a subsampling Rao-Blackwell method for design-unbiased estimation.
result Yields efficiency gains over standard methods while ensuring valid estimation.
Partition functions of probability distributions are important quantities for model evaluation and comparisons. We present a new method to compute partition functions of complex and multimodal distributions. Such distributions are often sampled using simulated tempering, which augments the target space with an auxiliar…
New gradient estimators for discrete variables improve model training.
problem Training models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high gradient variance.
method Introduced novel gradient estimators based on importance sampling and statistical couplings, extending to categorical variables.
result Proposed gradient estimators outperform previous methods in systematic experiments.
DSM on manifolds removes singularities and computes small-noise expansions.
problem DSM on manifolds with singular noise.
method Rao-Blackwellized score matching, nearest-point projection, intrinsic Riemannian score.
result Canonical target equals intrinsic Riemannian score up to a small correction.
We introduce a dynamic mechanism for the solution of analytically-tractable substructure in probabilistic programs, using conjugate priors and affine transformations to reduce variance in Monte Carlo estimators. For inference with Sequential Monte Carlo, this automatically yields improvements such as locally-optimal pr…
Derives new equations for volatility models and option pricing.
problem Modeling and pricing options in local-stochastic-volatility models.
method Develops conditional forward equations and Dupire stochastic PDEs.
result Derives new SPDE for vanilla options.
New methods for CI testing under model misspecification.
problem Challenges in CI testing with misspecified models.
method Proposes new approximations and upper bounds for testing errors of regression-based CI tests.
result Introduces the Rao-Blackwellized Predictor Test (RBPT) robust against misspecified inductive biases.
Policy optimization on high-dimensional continuous control tasks exhibits its difficulty caused by the large variance of the policy gradient estimators. We present the action subspace dependent gradient (ASDG) estimator which incorporates the Rao-Blackwell theorem (RB) and Control Variates (CV) into a unified framework…
Fibonacci Ensembles use Fibonacci weights to improve ensemble learning, inspired by natural growth patterns.
problem Improving ensemble learning methods to enhance model performance and interpretability.
method Introduces Fibonacci weights and a recursive ensemble dynamic to reduce variance and enrich representational depth.
result Fibonacci weighting can match or improve upon uniform averaging in ensemble learning experiments.
To address the challenge of backpropagating the gradient through categorical variables, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-swap-merge (ARSM) gradient estimator that is unbiased and has low variance. ARSM first uses variable augmentation, REINFORCE, and Rao-Blackwellization to re-express the gradient as an expectation und…
We introduce local expectation gradients which is a general purpose stochastic variational inference algorithm for constructing stochastic gradients through sampling from the variational distribution. This algorithm divides the problem of estimating the stochastic gradients over multiple variational parameters into sma…
Blackwell's theorems influence modern AI through information compression and decision making.
problem Information compression and decision making under uncertainty.
method Theorems developed in the 1940s and 1950s, applied to modern AI.
result Blackwell theorems remain relevant and influence modern AI subfields.
Bayesian SAE model with spectral clustering and uncertainty quantification.
problem Small Area Estimation (SAE) with uncertainty quantification.
method Spectral clustering with external covariates, posterior projections, and CPMSE.
result Closed form expressions for posterior mean estimators and CPMSE.
Two new estimators reduce costs and improve accuracy for EHR outcome prediction.
problem Sparse estimate distributions, high computational cost, and high sampling variance in EHR outcome prediction.
method Proposed SCOPE and REACH estimators that leverage next-token probability distributions.
result SCOPE and REACH match Monte Carlo accuracy with token reductions of 2.5-3.4 times and variance guarantees.
A new algorithm reduces bias in estimating model parameters.
problem Efficient estimation of model parameters in non-linear state-space models.
method Parisian particle Gibbs (PPG) algorithm for bias reduction in online learning.
result Non-asymptotic bounds on bias and variance for PPG.
New method reduces bias in learning from large action spaces using selective importance sampling.
problem Learning from large-scale recommendation systems with bandit feedback and supervised labels.
method Selective Importance Sampling (sIS) and Policy Optimization for eXtreme Models (POXM) algorithm.
result POXM method significantly outperforms existing methods in learning from bandit feedback on XMC tasks.
We present a novel method in the family of particle MCMC methods that we refer to as particle Gibbs with ancestor sampling (PG-AS). Similarly to the existing PG with backward simulation (PG-BS) procedure, we use backward sampling to (considerably) improve the mixing of the PG kernel. Instead of using separate forward a…
AugMask trains diffusion models on incomplete tabular data by augmenting missing values and applying denoising supervision.
problem Training diffusion models on incomplete tabular data with missing values.
method AugMask uses stochastic augmentation and denoising supervision to adapt diffusion models to incomplete data.
result AugMask enables diffusion-based tabular generators to outperform specialized missing-aware baselines across various datasets and missingness regimes.
The decentralized particle filter (DPF) was proposed recently to increase the level of parallelism of particle filtering. Given a decomposition of the state space into two nested sets of variables, the DPF uses a particle filter to sample the first set and then conditions on this sample to generate a set of samples for…
We revisit the Bayesian online inference problems for the linear dynamic systems (LDS) under non- Gaussian environment. The noises can naturally be non-Gaussian (skewed and/or heavy tailed) or to accommodate spurious observations, noises can be modeled as heavy tailed. However, at the cost of such noise robustness, the…
New method scales inference for deep discrete models to thousands of states.
problem Traditional inference limits model capacity for deep discrete models.
method Randomized Dynamic Programming (RDP) algorithms for scaling inference.
result RDP achieves low bias and variance while reducing computation.
We consider probabilistic programming for birth-death models of evolution and introduce a new widely-applicable inference method that combines an extension of the alive particle filter (APF) with automatic Rao-Blackwellization via delayed sampling. Birth-death models of evolution are an important family of phylogenetic…
New estimators outperform maximum likelihood without hyper-parameter estimation.
problem Improving system identification performance without hyper-parameter estimation.
method Developed generalized Bayes and closed-form biased estimators using excess MSE.
result New estimators have comparable performance to empirical-Bayes-based regularized estimator.
New estimator reduces kernel mean estimation error.
problem Kernel mean estimation in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces.
method Corrupt data with known distributions and estimate kernel mean under the corrupted distribution.
result The marginalized kernel mean estimator achieves lower estimation error.
Dual Bayesian Affine Estimators for Wiener-type state-space models
problem Estimating parameters in Wiener-type state-space models
method Fixed-point architecture combining two affine estimators
result Dual basis-parameter estimator achieves comparable parameter MSE to purely affine estimator
Enhances gradient estimates for Hermitian Monge-Ampère equations.
problem Improving estimates for Hermitian Monge-Ampère equations.
method Improves gradient estimates using Evans-Krylov and third derivatives estimates.
result Enhanced estimates for second and third order derivatives.
Paper proposes robust estimators for GANs under Wasserstein contamination.
problem Robust estimation of distributions under contamination.
method Wasserstein GAN-based estimators for location, covariance, and regression.
result Proposed estimators are minimax optimal in many scenarios.
New framework converts offline to online estimation using black-box offline estimators.
problem Convert offline estimation algorithms to online estimation algorithms.
method Oracle-Efficient Online Estimation (OEOE) framework.
result Achieves near-optimal online estimation error via black-box offline estimators.
Proposes variational autoencoder for efficient MMSE estimation.
problem Efficient parameterized MMSE estimation for noisy observations.
method Variational autoencoder models data distribution, approximates MMSE.
result Proposed estimator performs well compared to state-of-the-art.
Paper improves Fisher information estimation methods.
problem Estimating Fisher information for location parameters.
method Revisits and improves Bhattacharya estimator, introduces clipped estimator.
result Clipped estimator shows superior convergence rates in Gaussian noise.
Proposes a robust estimator for RD designs.
problem Estimating treatment effects in RD designs.
method Doubly robust estimator combining two estimators.
result Enhances robustness of treatment effect estimators.
SCOPE estimator improves covariance and precision matrix estimation.
problem Estimating covariance and precision matrices accurately.
method Distributionally robust optimization with convex spectral divergence.
result SCOPE estimator reduces spectral bias and improves condition number.
We present a multi-task learning approach to jointly estimate the means of multiple independent data sets. The proposed multi-task averaging (MTA) algorithm results in a convex combination of the single-task maximum likelihood estimates. We derive the optimal minimum risk estimator and the minimax estimator, and show t…
Obtaining more accurate equity value estimates is the starting point for stock selection, value-based indexing in a noisy market, and beating benchmark indices through tactical style rotation. Unfortunately, discounted cash flow, method of comparables, and fundamental analysis typically yield discrepant valuation estim…
The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a kernel-based distance between probability distributions useful in many applications (Gretton et al. 2012), bearing a simple estimator with pleasing computational and statistical properties. Being able to efficiently estimate the variance of this estimator is very helpful to vario…
Stochastic volatility modelling of financial processes has become increasingly popular. The proposed models usually contain a stationary volatility process. We will motivate and review several nonparametric methods for estimation of the density of the volatility process. Both models based on discretely sampled continuo…
A new copula estimation method using classification.
problem Estimating copula density from joint and marginal distributions.
method Train a classifier to distinguish joint density from product of marginals.
result Empirically outperforms existing copula estimators.
This paper reviews SDR methods for multivariate response regression.
problem Handling sufficient dimension reduction for multivariate response regression.
method Characterizes SDR estimators as inverse or forward regression methods.
result Pooled marginal, projective resampling, distance-based, ordinary least squares, partial least squares, and semiparametric SDR estimators are discussed.
Density ratio estimation is a vital tool in both machine learning and statistical community. However, due to the unbounded nature of density ratio, the estimation procedure can be vulnerable to corrupted data points, which often pushes the estimated ratio toward infinity. In this paper, we present a robust estimator wh…
TAKDE optimizes kernel density estimation for real-time dynamic processes.
problem Real-time density estimation in applications like computer vision and signal processing.
method Derives asymptotic mean integrated squared error (AMISE) upper bound for 'sliding window' kernel density estimator and proposes TAKDE as a novel, theoretically optimal estimator.
result TAKDE outperforms other dynamic density estimators in terms of test log-likelihood and runtime.
We introduce two new estimators of the bivariate Hurst exponent in the power-law cross-correlations setting -- the cross-periodogram and local X-Whittle estimators -- as generalizations of their univariate counterparts. As the spectrum-based estimators are dependent on a part of the spectrum taken into consideration …