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Poster
Stein Self-Repulsive Dynamics: Benefits From Past Samples
Mao Ye · Tongzheng Ren · Qiang Liu

Thu Dec 10 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Poster Session 5 #1609
in Poster Session 6 »

We propose a new Stein self-repulsive dynamics for obtaining diversified samples from intractable un-normalized distributions. Our idea is to introduce Stein variational gradient as a repulsive force to push the samples of Langevin dynamics away from the past trajectories. This simple idea allows us to significantly decrease the auto-correlation in Langevin dynamics and hence increase the effective sample size. Importantly, as we establish in our theoretical analysis, the asymptotic stationary distribution remains correct even with the addition of the repulsive force, thanks to the special properties of the Stein variational gradient. We perform extensive empirical studies of our new algorithm, showing that our method yields much higher sample efficiency and better uncertainty estimation than vanilla Langevin dynamics.

Author Information

Mao Ye (The University of Texas at Austin)
Tongzheng Ren (UT Austin)
Qiang Liu (UT Austin)

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