Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods comprise one of the most successful approaches to approximate Bayesian filtering. However, SMC without good proposal distributions struggle in high dimensions. We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology that generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approxi…
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48 results for “sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)”
Pricing options is an important problem in financial engineering. In many scenarios of practical interest, financial option prices associated to an underlying asset reduces to computing an expectation w.r.t.~a diffusion process. In general, these expectations cannot be calculated analytically, and one way to approximat…
Convergence Bounds for Sequential Monte Carlo on Multimodal Distributions using Soft Decompositionmath.ST
The paper improves SMC algorithm for multi-modal distributions by proving variance bounds.
problem Problems with SMC on multi-modal distributions, especially in terms of mixing time.
method Proves variance bounds for SMC on multi-modal distributions using soft decomposition.
result Bounds on SMC variance depend on local rather than global mixing times.
AFT combines AIS, SMC, and NFs for better Monte Carlo estimates.
problem Estimating normalizing constants of complex probability distributions.
method Annealed Flow Transport (AFT) integrates AIS, SMC, and normalizing flows.
result AFT improves Monte Carlo estimates of normalizing constants and expectations.
Finite Sample Complexity of Sequential Monte Carlo Estimators on Multimodal Target Distributionsstat.CO
New bounds for SMC show its advantage over MCMC in multimodal distributions.
problem Estimating expectations under multimodal distributions with slow global mixing.
method Proves finite sample complexities for SMC with local mixing times, addressing bias through sequential resampling.
result SMC provides fully polynomial time approximation for multimodal problems.
New method tunes SMC samplers efficiently without high costs.
problem Tuning SMC samplers with unadjusted kernels is challenging.
method Greedy Incremental Divergence Minimization (GIDM) for step size tuning.
result GIDM reduces KL divergence and tunes SMC samplers efficiently.
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 monotonically increasing sequence of probability spaces. By targeting these auxili…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods have successfully been used in many applications in engineering, statistics and physics. However, these are seldom used in financial option pricing literature and practice. This paper presents SMC method for pricing barrier options with continuous and discrete monitoring of the barr…
Hess-MC2: Sequential Monte Carlo Squared using Hessian Information and Second Order Proposalsstat.ML
Enhances SMC² with Hessian info for more efficient posterior approximation.
problem Improving accuracy and efficiency in Bayesian inference.
method Integrates second-order information (Hessian) into SMC²'s proposal distribution.
result Second-order proposals lead to more accurate posterior approximations and better step-size selection.
New SMC samplers improve stochastic optimisation efficiency.
problem Optimizing functions with intractable gradients in machine learning and statistics.
method Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for stochastic optimisation.
result Significant computational gains achieved with SMC approximations.
New SMC algorithm reduces memory usage for online clustering.
problem Uncertainty in online clustering with complex distributions.
method Decomposes clustering into independent subproblems using SMC.
result Accurately and efficiently solves clustering problems.
New SMC sampler improves diffusion model sampling efficiency.
problem Sampling generative diffusion models efficiently.
method Constructs correlated observation paths and designs a sampler.
result Improved statistical efficiency, especially under outlier conditions.
ChEES-HMC improves SMC samplers' efficiency and speed.
problem Efficiently sampling from complex posterior distributions.
method Incorporating ChEES-HMC into SMC samplers.
result ChEES-HMC outperforms NUTS in speed and efficiency.
New algorithm reduces overfitting in neural networks.
problem Overfitting in neural networks.
method Integrates SMC with SGHMC for mini-batch sampling.
result SMCSGHMC outperforms SGD and deep ensembles.
Researchers develop a new SMC sampler for Wishart processes to improve dynamic covariance inference.
problem Challenging inference of dynamic covariance in various scientific fields.
method Introduce Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler for the Wishart process.
result SMC sampling provides more robust estimates and out-of-sample predictions of dynamic covariance.
This paper analyzes error bounds for biased SMC samplers in conditional sampling.
problem Analyzing error bounds for biased SMC samplers in conditional sampling.
method Develops a non-asymptotic error analysis for SMC samplers with biased mutation kernels.
result Derives the first non-asymptotic error bound for conditional sampling with score-based diffusion models.
Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte Carlo techniques (Møller et al., 2006; Murray et al., 2006) for tackling this pr…
PASOA optimizes Bayesian design by improving SMC samplers and EIG.
problem Sequential design optimization for accurate parameter inference.
method Sequential optimization using contrastive estimation, SMC samplers, and tempering.
result PASOA optimizes design and inference with improved consistency.
We propose nested sequential Monte Carlo (NSMC), a methodology to sample from sequences of probability distributions, even where the random variables are high-dimensional. NSMC generalises the SMC framework by requiring only approximate, properly weighted, samples from the SMC proposal distribution, while still resulti…
New SMC method for pBNNs improves scalability and predictive performance.
problem Training pBNNs with high-dimensional stochastic parameters.
method Gradient-based proposals within SMC samplers.
result New method outperforms state-of-the-art in predictive performance and training time.
One of the key challenges in identifying nonlinear and possibly non-Gaussian state space models (SSMs) is the intractability of estimating the system state. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, such as the particle filter (introduced more than two decades ago), provide numerical solutions to the nonlinear state estima…
Persistent sampling improves SMC efficiency by retaining and reusing particles.
problem High computational costs and particle impoverishment in SMC.
method Persistent sampling (PS) retains and reuses particles from all prior iterations, using multiple importance sampling and resampling from a mixture of historical distributions.
result PS achieves more accurate posterior approximations and lower variance in marginal likelihood estimates without additional likelihood evaluations.
CHMC improves HMC efficiency for multimodal distributions.
problem Slow convergence of HMC in multimodal distributions.
method Integrates a counterdiabatic term to optimize Hamiltonian changes.
result CHMC achieves efficient sampling from challenging distributions.
Two new deterministic offspring selection methods reduce statistical distance in SMC and pMCMC.
problem Improving the performance of resampling in SMC methods.
method Proposes two deterministic offspring selection methods to minimize KL divergence and TV distance.
result Our methods outperform or match state-of-the-art resampling schemes on benchmarks.
We use SMC with twist functions to improve probabilistic inference in LLMs.
problem Improving probabilistic inference in large language models.
method We use Sequential Monte Carlo with learned twist functions to estimate expected future values and focus inference on promising sequences.
result Twisted SMC improves the accuracy of language model inference and evaluation.
CRAFT improves on existing methods for sampling complex distributions.
problem Sampling from complex probability distributions.
method Combines SMC with variational inference using normalizing flows.
result Improves on Annealed Flow Transport Monte Carlo and MCMC-based Stochastic Normalizing Flows.
Paper proposes a new method for sampling from complex distributions.
problem Sampling from unnormalised density functions in complex distributions.
method Combines amortised and particle-based methods with reinforcement learning.
result Improves sampling from complex distributions compared to existing methods.
We show how to speed up Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for Bayesian inference in large data problems by data subsampling. SMC sequentially updates a cloud of particles through a sequence of distributions, beginning with a distribution that is easy to sample from such as the prior and ending with the posterior distributio…
We propose a novel class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms, appropriate for inference in probabilistic graphical models. This class of algorithms adopts a divide-and-conquer approach based upon an auxiliary tree-structured decomposition of the model of interest, turning the overall inferential task into a coll…
Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases that are hard to quantify. The latter enjoy asymptotic consistency, but can suffer …
State space models (SSM) have been widely applied for the analysis and visualization of large sequential datasets. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a very popular particle-based method to sample latent states from intractable posteriors. However, SSM is significantly influenced by the choice of the proposal. Recently Ha…
We build on auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo (AESMC): a method for model and proposal learning based on maximizing the lower bound to the log marginal likelihood in a broad family of structured probabilistic models. Our approach relies on the efficiency of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for performing inference in st…
A core problem in statistics and probabilistic machine learning is to compute probability distributions and expectations. This is the fundamental problem of Bayesian statistics and machine learning, which frames all inference as expectations with respect to the posterior distribution. The key challenge is to approximat…
The paper studies how to improve language model inference using particle filtering.
problem Understanding the accuracy-cost tradeoffs of inference-time methods for large language models.
method Introduces particle filtering algorithms like Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to study language model inference.
result Identifies criteria enabling non-asymptotic guarantees for SMC and fundamental limits faced by all particle filtering methods.
-means: Fighting against Degeneracy in Sequential Monte Carlo with an Application to Trackingstat.ML
For regular particle filter algorithm or Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, the initial weights are traditionally dependent on the proposed distribution, the posterior distribution at the current timestamp in the sampled sequence, and the target is the posterior distribution of the previous timestamp. This is techni…
A key limitation of sampling algorithms for approximate inference is that it is difficult to quantify their approximation error. Widely used sampling schemes, such as sequential importance sampling with resampling and Metropolis-Hastings, produce output samples drawn from a distribution that may be far from the target …
New method improves variational inference for better posterior approximation.
problem Challenges in minimizing inclusive KL divergence for amortized variational inference.
method Likelihood-tempered sequential Monte Carlo samplers to estimate inclusive KL gradient.
result SMC-Wake method fits variational distributions more accurately than existing methods.
We extend Bayesian multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms beyond their original setting by making use of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. A MAB is a sequential decision making problem where the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long term payoff, where only the reward of the executed action is observed. In the …
Particle Markov chain Monte Carlo (PMCMC) is a systematic way of combining the two main tools used for Monte Carlo statistical inference: sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We present a novel PMCMC algorithm that we refer to as particle Gibbs with ancestor sampling (PGAS). PGAS provides t…
The paper connects tempering and entropic mirror descent for sampling.
problem Sampling from a target distribution with known unnormalized density.
method Establishes the connection between tempering SMC and entropic mirror descent, deriving convergence rates and geometric insights.
result Tempering SMC iterates correspond to entropic mirror descent on the reverse KL divergence, providing new optimization perspectives.
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 training a discriminative model, namely a neural network, in order to approximate the …
This study compares parallel SMC and MCMC for Bayesian deep learning, showing SMC parallel is faster.
problem Efficiently performing Bayesian deep learning with parallel computing.
method Compared sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in parallel settings.
result Parallel SMC achieves similar convergence as a single SMC but with reduced communication time.
Combines SMC and diffusion-based samplers for improved sampling performance.
problem Sampling from unnormalized densities efficiently and robustly.
method Viewing SMC and diffusion-based samplers as continuous-time processes, SCLD combines their strengths.
result SCLD achieves improved performance on multiple benchmark problems with less training budget.
New method discovers accurate time series models using SMC and MCMC.
problem Discovering accurate models of complex time series data.
method Bayesian nonparametric prior, sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), involutive MCMC.
result 10x--100x runtime speedup over previous methods.
Improves inference-time alignment for diffusion models without updating weights.
problem Aligning diffusion models without updating weights for high-reward outputs.
method Trust-Region Iterative Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo (TRI-TSMC) for variance reduction and efficiency.
result Improves primary alignment objectives on text generation tasks.
NAS-X improves inference and model learning for SLVMs.
problem Challenges in analytic inference and model learning for flexible SLVMs.
method NAS-X combines reweighted wake-sleep and smoothing sequential Monte Carlo.
result NAS-X provides low-bias and low-variance gradient estimates.
MCGDiff uses SGM to guide SMC for solving ill-posed linear inverse problems.
problem Solving ill-posed linear inverse problems in Bayesian settings.
method Exploiting SGM structure, defining a sequence of intermediate problems, and using SMC methods.
result MCGDiff outperforms competing methods in Bayesian ill-posed inverse problems.
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to find the member of this family that most closely approximates the exact posterior…