Reviews: Thermostat-assisted continuously-tempered Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Bayesian learning
–Neural Information Processing Systems
This paper presents a sampling method that combines Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), mini-batches, tempering, and thermostats, to more efficiently explore multimodal target distributions. It is demonstrated on a number of substantial neural network problems using real data sets. This is an interesting method, and the empirical results are quite substantial. Figure 2 does a nice job of demonstrating how the omission of any of the ingredients (e.g. the tempering, or the thermostat) is detrimental to the overall result, which is a nice illustration of how the combination works together well. This is followed by some substantial image classification examples.