Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (SGHMC) is a momentum version of stochastic gradient descent with properly injected Gaussian noise to find a global minimum. In this paper, non-asymptotic convergence analysis of SGHMC is given in the context of non-convex optimization, where subsampling techniques are used over an i.i.d dataset for gradient updates. Our results complement those of [RRT17] and improve on those of [GGZ18].
@cite_9: We study the problem of sampling from a distribution where the negative logarithm of the target density is @math -smooth everywhere and @math -strongly convex outside a ball of radius @math , but potentially non-convex inside this ball. We study both overdamped and underdamped Langevin MCMC and prove upper bounds on the time required to obtain a sample from a distribution that is within @math of the target distribution in @math -Wasserstein distance. For the first-order method (overdamped Langevin MCMC), the time complexity is @math , where @math is the dimension of the underlying space. For the second-order method (underdamped Langevin MCMC), the time complexity is @math for some explicit positive constant @math . Surprisingly, the convergence rate is only polynomial in the dimension @math and the target accuracy @math . It is however exponential in the problem parameter @math , which is a measure of non-logconcavity of the target distribution.
Relaxing convexity is a more challenging issue. In @cite_9 , the problem of sampling from a target distribution @math where @math is L-smooth everywhere and @math -strongly convex outside a ball of finite radius. They provide upper bounds for the number of steps to be within a given precision level @math of the 1-Wasserstein distance between the HMC algorithm and the equilibrium distribution.