Variational inference is increasingly being addressed with stochastic optimization. In this setting, the gradient's variance plays a crucial role in the optimization procedure, since high variance gradients lead to poor convergence. A popular approach used to reduce gradient's variance involves the use of control varia…
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48 results for “control-variate”
Optimizes MCMC chains with neural control variates.
problem Reducing variance in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulations.
method Uses neural networks as control variates to minimize asymptotic variance.
result Derives optimal convergence rate under various ergodicity assumptions.
New algorithm uses control variates to improve multi-armed bandit performance.
problem Stochastic multi-armed bandits with auxiliary reward information.
method Developed UCB-CV algorithm using control variates for mean estimation.
result UCB-CV algorithm provides tighter confidence bounds and smaller variance.
Improved confidence interval estimation with control variates.
problem Estimating confidence intervals with minimal samples.
method Designing an estimation algorithm using control variates and leveraging order statistics.
result Improved asymptotic efficiency compared to existing algorithms.
This paper develops scalable control variates for Monte Carlo methods using stochastic optimization.
problem Reducing variance in Monte Carlo estimators for large-scale problems.
method Control variates based on Stein operators, optimized through stochastic optimization.
result Novel theoretical results and empirical validations show effective variance reduction.
A new method reduces variance in training discrete latent variable models.
problem High variance in stochastic gradient estimators for discrete latent variable models.
method Double control variates for score function estimators using Taylor expansions.
result Our method can have lower variance compared to other estimators.
We use neural networks as control variates with geometric integration techniques.
problem Analytic integration of neural network approximations for variance reduction.
method Integration domain subdivision using computational geometry for MLPs with continuous piecewise linear activation functions.
result Neural networks can be used as control variates with geometric integration methods.
New method reduces inference variance for faster optimization.
problem High variance in black-box variational inference.
method Joint control variate addressing both data subsampling and Monte Carlo noise.
result Significantly reduced gradient variance, leading to faster optimization.
Combines control variates and adaptive importance sampling for Monte Carlo integration.
problem Improving Monte Carlo integration accuracy with control variates and adaptive sampling.
method A quadrature rule combining control variates and adaptive importance sampling.
result Non-asymptotic bound on the probabilistic error of the procedure.
The paper explores how control variates can reduce variance in Monte Carlo simulations, especially for Sobolev functions.
problem Efficiency of control variates in reducing variance for Monte Carlo simulations.
method Study of a specific quadrature rule using nonparametric regression-adjusted control variates.
result A specific quadrature rule can improve the Monte Carlo rate and achieve the minimax optimal rate under sufficient smoothness assumptions.
This work improves variational inference by reducing gradient variance.
problem Hard optimization of flexible variational distributions.
method Control variate based on quadratic approximation of the model's mean and covariance.
result Significant improvement in gradient variance and optimization convergence.
ControlSHAP stabilizes Shapley value approximations using control variates.
problem High computational cost of exact Shapley values in blackbox models.
method ControlSHAP uses Monte Carlo control variates to stabilize Shapley value approximations.
result Significant reduction in Monte Carlo variability of Shapley estimates.
In statistics and machine learning, approximation of an intractable integration is often achieved by using the unbiased Monte Carlo estimator, but the variances of the estimation are generally high in many applications. Control variates approaches are well-known to reduce the variance of the estimation. These control v…
NCV uses neural networks to improve Monte Carlo integration.
problem Improving variance reduction in parametric Monte Carlo integration.
method NCV combines a normalizing flow and a neural network to approximate the integrand and solve the integral equation, with a neural importance sampler to estimate the difference.
result NCV achieves state-of-the-art performance in light transport simulation with reduced noise and negligible bias.
Proposes variance reduction techniques for sliced Wasserstein distance estimation.
problem Intractability of estimating sliced Wasserstein distances.
method Uses control variates based on Gaussian approximations of projected measures.
result Significant reduction in variance of SW distance estimators.
This work proposes using zero-variance control variates to reduce variance in pathwise gradient estimators for variational inference.
problem Pathwise gradient estimators in variational inference have high variance, leading to inefficient optimization.
method Apply zero-variance control variates to pathwise gradient estimators.
result Zero-variance control variates can significantly reduce the variance of pathwise gradient estimators without requiring complex assumptions.
New method reduces variance in Bayesian inverse problems.
problem High variance in Monte Carlo estimates for inverse problems.
method Conditional neural control variates based on Stein's identity.
result Substantial variance reduction across different inverse problems.
Meta-CVs leverage task similarity to reduce variance with limited data.
problem Reducing variance in Monte Carlo estimators with few samples.
method Meta-learning control variates for related tasks.
result Meta-CVs lead to significant variance reduction in settings with limited data.
It is well known that Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods scale poorly with dataset size. A popular class of methods for solving this issue is stochastic gradient MCMC. These methods use a noisy estimate of the gradient of the log posterior, which reduces the per iteration computational cost of the algorithm. Despi…
Paper introduces a new method to solve complex PDEs efficiently.
problem Solving high-dimensional semilinear PDEs and BSDEs.
method Decomposes PDEs into linear and nonlinear parts, uses Deep BSDE solver with control variate method.
result Errors of the new method are much smaller than those of the original Deep BSDE solver.
New method reduces training cost by using approximate gradients.
problem Training neural networks is computationally expensive.
method Uses control variates to approximate gradients without full backward pass.
result Efficacy demonstrated on a vision transformer classification task.
Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample efficiency during training. In this work, we propose a control variate method to effe…
Neural SDEs reduce variance in stochastic simulations.
problem Efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations in finance.
method Use neural SDEs with control variates parameterized by neural networks.
result Prove optimality conditions for variance reduction in SDEs with infinite activity.
Algorithm reduces variance in causal effect estimation from multiple datasets.
problem Unidentifiable average treatment effect in observational data due to selection bias.
method Constructs control variates using datasets where ATE is not identifiable to reduce variance.
result Significant reduction in variance of ATE estimate using control variates.
A new method using spherical harmonics approximates the Sliced-Wasserstein distance.
problem Approximating the Sliced-Wasserstein distance between probability measures.
method Spherical Harmonics Control Variates (SHCV) method for Monte Carlo approximation of the SW distance.
result SHCV method provides an improved rate of convergence compared to Monte Carlo for general measures.
A new weighted MLMC method improves efficiency in Monte Carlo simulations.
problem Improving efficiency in Monte Carlo simulations with correlated coarse level approximations.
method Generalization of MLMC to any number of levels with control variates and weights.
result Significant efficiency improvements possible, especially when coarse level approximations are poorly correlated.
Improves gradient estimation for discrete distributions with variance reduction techniques.
problem Excessive variance in gradient estimation for discrete distributions.
method Stein operators for discrete distributions and control variates.
result Substantially lower variance in gradient estimation.
Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address a bias-variance trade off between reliance on current estimates, which could be …
DTM improves dLLM fine-tuning stability and performance.
problem Intractable sequence-level marginal likelihoods for masked diffusion models.
method Discrete Tilt Matching (DTM) recasts dLLM fine-tuning as state-level matching of local unmasking posteriors under reward tilting.
result DTM yields strong gains on Sudoku and Countdown while remaining competitive on MATH500 and GSM8K.
Develops numerical methods for pricing exchange options in a market with limited liquidity.
problem Pricing European style exchange options in a market with finite liquidity.
method Integrates price impact into the dynamics of correlated assets using a controlled variate approach.
result Numerical pricing methods for exchange options are developed and validated.
New method reduces variance in complex probabilistic model optimization.
problem High variance in stochastic optimisation of complex models.
method Use recognition network to approximate optimal control variate for each mini-batch.
result Sub-optimal variance reduction is improved with new approach.
A key challenge for gradient based optimization methods in model-free reinforcement learning is to develop an approach that is sample efficient and has low variance. In this work, we apply Kronecker-factored curvature estimation technique (KFAC) to a recently proposed gradient estimator for control variate optimization…
Our goal is to improve variance reducing stochastic methods through better control variates. We first propose a modification of SVRG which uses the Hessian to track gradients over time, rather than to recondition, increasing the correlation of the control variates and leading to faster theoretical convergence close to …
In this paper a novel modification of the multilevel Monte Carlo approach, allowing for further significant complexity reduction, is proposed. The idea of the modification is to use the method of control variates to reduce variance at level zero. We show that, under a proper choice of control variates, one can reduce t…
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but in their conventional form rely on having an accurate approximation of f, a pri…
VarGrad reduces variance in ELBO gradient estimation for variational inference.
problem Improving the variance of gradient estimators in variational inference.
method VarGrad uses a new log-variance loss to estimate the ELBO gradient, achieving lower variance than the score function method.
result VarGrad offers a lower variance gradient estimator compared to other methods.
Optimal Variance Control of the Score Function Gradient Estimator for Importance Weighted Boundsstat.ML
Paper improves variance control in importance weighted variational bounds.
problem Improving the variance of gradient estimators for IWAE.
method Develops a novel control variate that grows SNR as √K for large K.
result Empirically, the method yields superior variance reduction for generative models.
There are no known exact formulas for the valuation of a number of exotic options, and this is particularly true for options under discrete monitoring and for American style options. Therefore, one usually recourses to a Monte Carlo Simulation approach, amongst other numerical methods, to estimate the value of these op…
This study compares direct and indirect methods for estimating own funds in life insurance, finding indirect methods more effective under realistic asset-liability coupling.
problem Computing own funds for life insurers using direct and indirect methods in a risk-neutral pricing framework.
method Introduced a novel family of mixed estimators including both direct and indirect methods, integrated into a control variate framework for variance reduction.
result The indirect method is more effective under realistic asset-liability coupling, but neither method is universally superior.
Paper proposes SCott optimizer to reduce forecasting model training variance.
problem Large variance in gradient estimation for forecasting models.
method Stratified sampling and control variate to reduce gradient variance.
result SCott optimizer converges faster on time series forecasting problems.
After presenting Actor Critic Methods (ACM), we show ACM are control variate estimators. Using the projection theorem, we prove that the Q and Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) methods are optimal in the sense of the norm for the control variate estimators spanned by functions conditioned by the current state and acti…
A new fast method simulates stochastic volatility models.
problem Simulating stochastic volatility models efficiently.
method Karhunen-Loève expansions to express stochastic volatility as sine series, followed by analytical derivation of integrals.
result Simulation is several hundred times faster than existing methods.
Paper adapts CVS method for TL in functional linear regression.
problem Improving estimation and prediction in scalar-on-function regression.
method Adapts control variates method for transfer learning.
result Establishes theoretical connection between O-TL and CVS-based TL.
Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradient estimates. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have limited applicability when the number of possible outcomes becomes large. In this w…
Paper proposes a closed-form formula for geometric Istanbul call options.
problem Pricing geometric Istanbul call options under the Black-Scholes model.
method Second-order Taylor expansion to derive a closed-form approximation.
result The proposed formula accurately approximates GIC values compared to Monte-Carlo simulations.
Evolution Strategies (ES) are a powerful class of blackbox optimization techniques that recently became a competitive alternative to state-of-the-art policy gradient (PG) algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a new method for improving accuracy of the ES algorithms, that as opposed to recent approaches…
Learning in models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high variance gradient estimators. Generally, approaches have relied on control variates to reduce the variance of the REINFORCE estimator. Recent work (Jang et al. 2016, Maddison et al. 2016) has taken a different approach, introducing a continuou…
Develops an accelerated algorithm for solving nonmonotone generalized equations.
problem Solving nonmonotone generalized equations with possibly non-accelerated schemes.
method Combines Nesterov's acceleration and variance-reduction techniques for a class of generalized equations.
result Achieves convergence rates, improving upon non-accelerated counterparts.