论文标题
随机的Stein变异牛顿法
A stochastic Stein Variational Newton method
论文作者
论文摘要
Stein变异梯度下降(SVGD)是一种基于通用优化的采样算法,最近在受欢迎程度上爆炸了,但受两个问题的限制:众所周知,它会产生偏见的样本,并且在复杂的分布上融合可能会降低。最近提出的SVGD(SSVGD)随机变体解决了第一个问题,通过将特殊噪声纳入SVGD动力学中,从而确保了渐近收敛性。同时,SVGD的牛顿样延伸型Stein变化牛顿(SVN)通过将Hessian信息纳入动力学,但也会产生偏见的样本,从而极大地加速了SVGD的收敛性。在本文中,我们得出并提供了一种实际实现,即SVN(SSVN)的随机变体,该变体在渐近正确且迅速收敛。我们证明了算法对困难类别的测试问题的有效性 - 混合Rosenbrock密度 - 并表明SSVN使用对数可能的SVGGD对应物的对数可能性降低了三个数量级的梯度评估。我们的结果表明,SSVN是一种有前途的方法,可以加速具有适度维度的高精度贝叶斯推理任务,$ d \ sim \ Mathcal {O}(10)$。
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to converge on complicated distributions. A recently proposed stochastic variant of SVGD (sSVGD) addresses the first issue, producing unbiased samples by incorporating a special noise into the SVGD dynamics such that asymptotic convergence is guaranteed. Meanwhile, Stein variational Newton (SVN), a Newton-like extension of SVGD, dramatically accelerates the convergence of SVGD by incorporating Hessian information into the dynamics, but also produces biased samples. In this paper we derive, and provide a practical implementation of, a stochastic variant of SVN (sSVN) which is both asymptotically correct and converges rapidly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on a difficult class of test problems -- the Hybrid Rosenbrock density -- and show that sSVN converges using three orders of magnitude fewer gradient evaluations of the log likelihood than its stochastic SVGD counterpart. Our results show that sSVN is a promising approach to accelerating high-precision Bayesian inference tasks with modest-dimension, $d\sim\mathcal{O}(10)$.