Stochastic viscosity approximations of Hamilton-Jacobi equations and variance reduction

We consider the computation of free energy-like quantities for diffusions in high dimension, when resorting to Monte Carlo simulation is necessary. Such stochastic computations typically suffer from high variance, in particular in a low noise regime, because the expectation is dominated by rare trajectories for which the observable reaches large values. Although importance sampling, or tilting of trajectories, is now a standard technique for reducing the variance of such estimators, quantitative criteria for proving that a given control reduces variance are scarce, and often do not apply to practical situations. The goal of this work is to provide a quantitative criterion for assessing whether a given bias reduces variance, and at which order. We rely for this on a recently introduced notion of stochastic solution for Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations. Based on this tool, we introduce the notion of k-stochastic viscosity approximation of a HJB equation. We next prove that such approximate solutions are associated with estimators having a relative variance of order k-1 at log-scale. Finally, in order to show that our definition is relevant, we provide examples of stochastic viscosity approximations of order one and two, with a numerical illustration confirming our theoretical findings.