Is there an analog of Nesterov acceleration for gradient-based MCMC?

From MaRDI portal
Publication:2040101



Abstract: We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin algorithm performs accelerated gradient descent in this metric. To characterize the convergence of the algorithm, we construct a Lyapunov functional and exploit hypocoercivity of the underdamped Langevin algorithm. As an application, we show that accelerated rates can be obtained for a class of nonconvex functions with the Langevin algorithm.


In continuous optimization problems, Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent method accelerates the convergence speed of the simple gradient descent method. This paper considers an analogue of such an acceleration method in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which in general have a major issue in convergence speed. As in the accelerated gradient descent for optimization, by introducing a momentum variable, the authors derive the stochastic differential equation for the accelerated dynamics in the space of probability distributions with the Kullback-Leibler divergence to the target distribution as the objective functional. Analyzing the convergence rate of the continuous accelerated dynamics and the discretization error, the authors show that the derived accelerated sampling algorithm improves the dimension and accuracy dependence of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm, which corresponds to the unadjusted gradient decent optimization. Thus, this paper provides a solid theoretical foundation for practical accelerated MCMC methods.



Cites work


Cited in
(43)








This page was built for publication: Is there an analog of Nesterov acceleration for gradient-based MCMC?

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2040101)