Meta-Learning For Stochastic Gradient MCMC

Wenbo Gong, Yingzhen Li, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Abstract: Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has become increasingly popular for simulating posterior samples in large-scale Bayesian modeling. However, existing SG-MCMC schemes are not tailored to any specific probabilistic model, even a simple modification of the underlying dynamical system requires significant physical intuition. This paper presents the first meta-learning algorithm that allows automated design for the underlying continuous dynamics of an SG-MCMC sampler. The learned sampler generalizes Hamiltonian dynamics with state-dependent drift and diffusion, enabling fast traversal and efficient exploration of energy landscapes. Experiments validate the proposed approach on Bayesian fully connected neural network, Bayesian convolutional neural network and Bayesian recurrent neural network tasks, showing that the learned sampler outperforms generic, hand-designed SG-MCMC algorithms, and generalizes to different datasets and larger architectures.

Keywords: Meta Learning, MCMC

TL;DR: This paper proposes a method to automate the design of stochastic gradient MCMC proposal using meta learning approach.

Code: [ WenboGong/MetaSGMCMC](https://github.com/WenboGong/MetaSGMCMC)

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1806.04522/code)