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Recursive Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Interacting Particle Systems using Virtual Particles
Sharrock, Louis, Kantas, Nikolas, Pavliotis, Grigorios A.
We study recursive maximum likelihood estimation for stochastic interacting particle systems based on continuous observation of a single particle. In this regime, consistent estimation of the finite-particle log-likelihood is not possible, even in the limit as the number of particles $N\rightarrow\infty$ and the time horizon $t\rightarrow\infty$. We thus seek to optimise the stationary log-likelihood of the limiting mean-field system. We achieve this via a form of stochastic gradient estimate in continuous time, with stochastic gradient estimates computed using the continuous trajectory of the single observed particle, alongside a virtual interacting particle system and a virtual tangent interacting particle system, which are integrated with the online parameter estimate. For fixed numbers of real and virtual particles, we show that the resulting algorithms drive the gradient of a finite-particle surrogate objective to zero as $t\to\infty$. We then prove that, in the iterated limit $t\to\infty$ followed by $N,M\to\infty$, these surrogate gradients converge uniformly to the gradient of the stationary log-likelihood of the limiting mean-field system, yielding convergence to its stationary points. We illustrate the method on several numerical examples, including a model with quadratic confinement and interaction potentials, a model of interacting FitzHugh--Nagumo neurons, and a stochastic Kuramoto model.
Autoencoder-Based Parameter Estimation for Superposed Multi-Component Damped Sinusoidal Signals
Iida, Momoka, Motohashi, Hayato, Takahashi, Hirotaka
Damped sinusoidal oscillations are widely observed in many physical systems, and their analysis provides access to underlying physical properties. However, parameter estimation becomes difficult when the signal decays rapidly, multiple components are superposed, and observational noise is present. In this study, we develop an autoencoder-based method that uses the latent space to estimate the frequency, phase, decay time, and amplitude of each component in noisy multi-component damped sinusoidal signals. We investigate multi-component cases under Gaussian-distribution training and further examine the effect of the training-data distribution through comparisons between Gaussian and uniform training. The performance is evaluated through waveform reconstruction and parameter-estimation accuracy. We find that the proposed method can estimate the parameters with high accuracy even in challenging setups, such as those involving a subdominant component or nearly opposite-phase components, while remaining reasonably robust when the training distribution is less informative. This demonstrates its potential as a tool for analyzing short-duration, noisy signals.
Preventing Model Collapse via Contraction-Conditioned Neural Filters
Han, Zongjian, Liang, Yiran, Wang, Ruiwen, Luo, Yiwei, Huang, Yilin, Song, Xiaotong, Wei, Dongqing
This paper presents a neural network filter method based on contraction operators to address model collapse in recursive training of generative models. Unlike \cite{xu2024probabilistic}, which requires superlinear sample growth ($O(t^{1+s})$), our approach completely eliminates the dependence on increasing sample sizes within an unbiased estimation framework by designing a neural filter that learns to satisfy contraction conditions. We develop specialized neural network architectures and loss functions that enable the filter to actively learn contraction conditions satisfying Assumption 2.3 in exponential family distributions, thereby ensuring practical application of our theoretical results. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that when the learned contraction conditions are satisfied, estimation errors converge probabilistically even with constant sample sizes, i.e., $\limsup_{t\to\infty}\mathbb{P}(\|\mathbf{e}_t\|>ฮด)=0$ for any $ฮด>0$. Experimental results show that our neural network filter effectively learns contraction conditions and prevents model collapse under fixed sample size settings, providing an end-to-end solution for practical applications.
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First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. Paper Summary: This paper treats a general multi-armed bandit problem in which the mean reward of each arm depends on a common unknown parameter. The authors consider a simple modification of the UCB1 algorithm. They show, unsurprisingly, that the algorithm satisfies a regret bound like that of UCB1. The main improvement of this paper is to show when the optimal arm can be identified perfectly by samples of the optimal arm, algorithm's regret is bounded by a constant independent of the time horizon.