Local-Global MCMC kernels: the best of both worlds

Recent works leveraging learning to enhance sampling have shown promising results, in particular by designing effective non-local moves and global proposals. However, learning accuracy is inevitably limited in regions where little data is available such as in the tails of distributions as well as in high-dimensional problems. In the present paper we study an Explore-Exploit Markov chain Monte Carlo strategy (Ex2MCMC) that combines local and global samplers showing that it enjoys the advantages of both approaches. We prove V-uniform geometric ergodicity of Ex2MCMC without requiring a uniform adaptation of the global sampler to the target distribution. We also compute explicit bounds on the mixing rate of the Explore-Exploit strategy under realistic conditions. Moreover, we also analyze an adaptive version of the strategy (FlEx2MCMC) where a normalizing flow is trained while sampling to serve as a proposal for global moves. We illustrate the efficiency of Ex2MCMC and its adaptive version on classical sampling benchmarks as well as in sampling high-dimensional distributions defined by Generative Adversarial Networks seen as Energy Based Models. We provide the code to reproduce the experiments at the link: https://github.com/svsamsonov/ex2mcmcnew.