Continual Repeated Annealed Flow Transport Monte Carlo

Authors: Alex Matthews, Michael Arbel, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, Arnaud Doucet

ICML 2022 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental In this section we empirically investigate the performance of CRAFT. First, in Section 4.1 we give a case study demonstrating the empirical benefit of CRAFT relative to AFT, then in Section 4.2 we show that CRAFT outperforms Stochastic Normalizing flows in two challenging examples. We then show a compelling example use case for CRAFT as a learnt proposal for a particle MCMC sampler applied to lattice field theory.
Researcher Affiliation Collaboration 1Deep Mind 2Universit e Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS. Correspondence to: Alexander G. D. G. Matthews <alexmatthews@google.com>, Arnaud Doucet <arnauddoucet@google.com>.
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1 SMC-NF-step
Open Source Code Yes Code for the algorithms and examples can be found at https://github.com/deepmind/annealed_flow_transport.
Open Datasets Yes We use the 1024 dimensional log Gaussian Cox process (LGCP) example which is the most challenging from (Arbel et al., 2021).
Dataset Splits Yes To make it fair at train time, the total CRAFT particle budget was divided in to two halves for AFT, one half was used for the training particles and the other half was used for the validation particles.
Hardware Specification Yes All experiments were carried out using a single Nvidia v100 GPU.
Software Dependencies No In terms of software dependencies for our code we used Python, JAX (Bradbury et al., 2018), Optax (Hessel et al., 2020), Haiku (Hennigan et al., 2020), and the Tensor Flow probability JAX substrate (Dillon et al., 2017). Specific version numbers for software components like Python or JAX libraries were not explicitly stated in the text.
Experiment Setup Yes All experiments used a geometric (log-linear) annealing schedule. The initial distribution was always a standard multivariate normal. All experiments used HMC as the Markov kernel, which was tuned to get a reasonable acceptance rate based on preliminary runs of SMC. Normalizing flows were always initialized to the identity flow. Wherever a stochastic gradient optimizer was required we used the Adam optimizer (Kingma and Ba, 2015).