Non-reversible Parallel Tempering for Deep Posterior Approximation

Abstract

Parallel tempering (PT), also known as replica exchange, is the go-to workhorse for simulations of multi-modal distributions. The key to the success of PT is to adopt efficient swap schemes. The popular deterministic even-odd (DEO) scheme exploits the non-reversibility property and has successfully reduced the communication cost from $O(P^2)$ to $O(P)$ given sufficiently many $P$ chains. However, such an innovation largely disappears in big data due to the limited chains and few bias-corrected swaps. To handle this issue, we generalize the DEO scheme to promote non-reversibility and propose a few solutions to tackle the underlying bias caused by the geometric stopping time. Notably, in big data scenarios, we obtain an appealing communication cost $O(P\log P)$ based on the optimal window size. In addition, we also adopt stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with large and constant learning rates as exploration kernels. Such a user-friendly nature enables us to conduct approximation tasks for complex posteriors without much tuning costs.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202