Researcher profile

Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Metropolis-Adjusted Diffusion Models

Sampling from score-based diffusion models incurs bias due to both time discretisation and the approximation of the score function. A common strategy for reducing this bias is to apply corrector steps based on the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) at each noise level within a predictor-corrector framework. However, ULA is itself a biased sampler, as it discretises a continuous diffusion process. In this work, we consider adjusted Langevin correctors that employ Metropolis--Hastings (MH) or Barker's accept-reject steps to correct for this bias. Since the target density ratio typically required by MH-based algorithms is unavailable, we propose methods that instead utilise the score function to compute the correct acceptance probability. We introduce the first exact method for adjusting Langevin corrections in diffusion models, based on a two-coin Bernoulli factory algorithm. We also propose an efficient approximation based on Simpson's rule that achieves accuracy of order $5/2$ in the step size at near-zero marginal cost. We demonstrate that these procedures improve sample quality on both synthetic and image datasets, yielding consistent gains in Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) on the latter.

preprint2023arXiv

A Multi-Resolution Framework for U-Nets with Applications to Hierarchical VAEs

U-Net architectures are ubiquitous in state-of-the-art deep learning, however their regularisation properties and relationship to wavelets are understudied. In this paper, we formulate a multi-resolution framework which identifies U-Nets as finite-dimensional truncations of models on an infinite-dimensional function space. We provide theoretical results which prove that average pooling corresponds to projection within the space of square-integrable functions and show that U-Nets with average pooling implicitly learn a Haar wavelet basis representation of the data. We then leverage our framework to identify state-of-the-art hierarchical VAEs (HVAEs), which have a U-Net architecture, as a type of two-step forward Euler discretisation of multi-resolution diffusion processes which flow from a point mass, introducing sampling instabilities. We also demonstrate that HVAEs learn a representation of time which allows for improved parameter efficiency through weight-sharing. We use this observation to achieve state-of-the-art HVAE performance with half the number of parameters of existing models, exploiting the properties of our continuous-time formulation.

preprint2022arXiv

Accurate simulations of nonlinear dynamic shear ruptures on pre-existing faults in 3D elastic solids with dual-pairing SBP methods

In this paper we derive and analyse efficient and stable numerical methods for accurate numerical simulations of nonlinear dynamic shear ruptures on non-planar faults embedded in 3D elastic solids using dual-paring (DP) summation by parts (SBP) finite difference (FD) methods. Specifically, for nonlinear dynamic earthquake ruptures, we demonstrate that the DP SBP FD operators [K. Mattsson. J. Comput. Phys., 335:283-310, 2017] generate spurious catastrophic high frequency wave modes that do not diminish with mesh refinement. Meanwhile our new dispersion relation preserving (DRP) SBP FD operators [C. Williams and K Duru, arXiv:2110.04957, 2021] have more accurate numerical dispersion relation properties and do not support poisonous spurious high frequency wave modes. Numerical simulations are performed in 3D with geometrically complex fault surfaces verifying the efficacy of the method. Our method accurately reproduces community developed dynamic rupture benchmark problems, proposed by Southern California Earthquake Center, with less computational effort than standard methods based on traditional SBP FD operators.

preprint2021arXiv

ColoRadar: The Direct 3D Millimeter Wave Radar Dataset

Millimeter wave radar is becoming increasingly popular as a sensing modality for robotic mapping and state estimation. However, there are very few publicly available datasets that include dense, high-resolution millimeter wave radar scans and there are none focused on 3D odometry and mapping. In this paper we present a solution to that problem. The ColoRadar dataset includes 3 different forms of dense, high-resolution radar data from 2 FMCW radar sensors as well as 3D lidar, IMU, and highly accurate groundtruth for the sensor rig's pose over approximately 2 hours of data collection in highly diverse 3D environments.