Dear all,

our next OWABC seminar www.warwick.ac.uk/oneworldabchttp://www.warwick.ac.uk/oneworldabc is quickly approaching.

We are happy to announce that our next speaker is Francesca Crucinio (King's College London), who will talk about "A connection between Tempering and Entropic Mirror Descent" on Thursday the 2nd May, 9am UK time.

Abstract: This work explores the connections between tempering (for Sequential Monte Carlo; SMC) and entropic mirror descent to sample from a target probability distribution whose unnormalized density is known. We establish that tempering SMC corresponds to entropic mirror descent applied to the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and obtain convergence rates for the tempering iterates. Our result motivates the tempering iterates from an optimization point of view, showing that tempering can be seen as a descent scheme of the KL divergence with respect to the Fisher-Rao geometry, in contrast to Langevin dynamics that perform descent of the KL with respect to the Wasserstein-2 geometry. We exploit the connection between tempering and mirror descent iterates to justify common practices in SMC and derive adaptive tempering rules that improve over other alternative benchmarks in the literature. Reference: N. Chopin, F. R. Crucinio, A. Korba, A connection between Tempering and Entropic Mirror Descent, Preprint at ArXiv: 2310.11914https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.11914.pdf

The talk will be streamed on MS Teams at this link https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YTNiMmNkZTUtYTI4Mi00Z... Meeting ID: 378 951 648 902 Passcode: YB8fb5 We are looking forward to seeing you on May 2, best, Massimiliano on the behalf of the OWABC Seminar organisers

------ Dr. Massimiliano Tamborrino Associate Professor and Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA) Fellow Department of Statistics University of Warwick https://warwick.ac.uk/tamborrino