Interacting Contour Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics
Authors: Wei Deng,Siqi Liang,Botao Hao,Guang Lin,Faming Liang
ICLR 2022,Poster

Abstract: We propose an interacting contour stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (ICSGLD) sampler, an embarrassingly parallel multiple-chain contour stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (CSGLD) sampler with efficient interactions. We show that ICSGLD can be theoretically more efficient than a single-chain CSGLD with an equivalent computational budget. We also present a novel random-field function, which facilitates the estimation of self-adapting parameters in big data and obtains free mode explorations. Empirically, we compare the proposed algorithm with popular benchmark methods for posterior sampling. The numerical results show a great potential of ICSGLD for large-scale uncertainty estimation tasks.