Title: Generalizing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with Neural Networks,
Abstract: We present a general-purpose method to train Markov chain Monte Carlo
kernels, parameterized by deep neural networks, that converge and mix quickly
to their target distribution. Our method generalizes Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
and is trained to maximize expected squared jumped distance, a proxy for mixing
speed. We demonstrate large empirical gains on a collection of simple but
challenging distributions, for instance achieving a 106x improvement in
effective sample size in one case, and mixing when standard HMC makes no
measurable progress in a second. Finally, we show quantitative and qualitative
gains on a real-world task: latent-variable generative modeling. We release an
open source TensorFlow implementation of the algorithm.