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Poster
On Sampling from the Gibbs Distribution with Random Maximum A-Posteriori Perturbations
Tamir Hazan · Subhransu Maji · Tommi Jaakkola

Thu Dec 05 07:00 PM -- 11:59 PM (PST) @ Harrah's Special Events Center, 2nd Floor
in Poster Session »

In this paper we describe how MAP inference can be used to sample efficiently from Gibbs distributions. Specifically, we provide means for drawing either approximate or unbiased samples from Gibbs' distributions by introducing low dimensional perturbations and solving the corresponding MAP assignments. Our approach also leads to new ways to derive lower bounds on partition functions. We demonstrate empirically that our method excels in the typical "high signal - high coupling'' regime. The setting results in ragged energy landscapes that are challenging for alternative approaches to sampling and/or lower bounds.

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Author Information

Tamir Hazan (Technion)
Subhransu Maji (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Tommi Jaakkola (MIT)

Tommi Jaakkola is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He received an M.Sc. degree in theoretical physics from Helsinki University of Technology, and Ph.D. from MIT in computational neuroscience. Following a Sloan postdoctoral fellowship in computational molecular biology, he joined the MIT faculty in 1998. His research interests include statistical inference, graphical models, and large scale modern estimation problems with predominantly incomplete data.

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