Thermostat-assisted continuously-tempered Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Bayesian learning

In this paper, we propose a novel sampling method, the thermostat-assisted continuously-tempered Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, for the purpose of multimodal Bayesian learning. It simulates a noisy dynamical system by incorporating both a continuously-varying tempering variable and the Nos\'e-Hoover thermostats. A significant benefit is that it is not only able to efficiently generate i.i.d. While the properties of the approach have been studied using synthetic datasets, our experiments on three real datasets have also shown its performance gains over several strong baselines for Bayesian learning with various types of neural networks plunged in. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.