Improving Gradient-guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference
About
We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling algorithm, ${\tt GGNS}$, combining the state of the art in differentiable programming, Hamiltonian slice sampling, clustering, mode separation, dynamic nested sampling, and parallelization. This unique combination allows ${\tt GGNS}$ to scale well with dimensionality and perform competitively on a variety of synthetic and real-world problems. We also show the potential of combining nested sampling with generative flow networks to obtain large amounts of high-quality samples from the posterior distribution. This combination leads to faster mode discovery and more accurate estimates of the partition function.
Pablo Lemos, Nikolay Malkin, Will Handley, Yoshua Bengio, Yashar Hezaveh, Laurence Perreault-Levasseur• 2023
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unconditional modeling | Funnel d = 10 | Delta log Z0.106 | 30 | |
| Unconditional modeling | 25GMM d = 2 | Delta Log Z0.518 | 30 | |
| Unconditional modeling | Manywell d = 32 | Δ log Z0.292 | 29 | |
| Conditional Sampling | MNIST pretrained VAE decoder (test) | log Z-82.406 | 15 |
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