Abstract:
Replica exchange method (RE), also known as parallel tempering, is an important technique for accelerating the convergence of the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. However, such a method requires the evaluation of the energy function based on the full dataset and is not scalable to big data. The na\"ive implementation of RE in mini-batch settings introduces large biases, which cannot be directly extended to the stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC), the standard sampling method for simulating from deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we propose an adaptive replica exchange SG-MCMC (reSG-MCMC) to automatically correct the bias and study the corresponding properties. The analysis implies an acceleration-accuracy trade-off in the numerical discretization of a Markov jump process in a stochastic environment. Empirically, we test the algorithm through extensive experiments on various setups and obtain the state-of-the-art results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and SVHN in both supervised learning and semi-supervised learning tasks.
