Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
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 under-damped 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.
Marcos Rubinstein, Farhad Rachidi-Haeri, Hamidreza Karami, Elias Per Joachim Le Boudec, Nicolas Mora Parra
Michael Christoph Gastpar, Adrien Vandenbroucque, Amedeo Roberto Esposito