GAD-PVI: A General Accelerated Dynamic-Weight Particle-Based Variational
  Inference Framework
Fangyikang Wang Huminhao Zhu Chao Zhang Hanbin Zhao Hui Qian
Particle-based Variational Inference (ParVI) methods approximate the target
distribution by iteratively evolving finite weighted particle systems. Recent
advances of ParVI methods reveal the benefits of accelerated position update
strategies and dynamic weight adjustment approaches. In this paper, we propose
the first ParVI framework that possesses both accelerated position update and
dynamical weight adjustment simultaneously, named the General Accelerated
Dynamic-Weight Particle-based Variational Inference (GAD-PVI) framework.
Generally, GAD-PVI simulates the semi-Hamiltonian gradient flow on a novel
Information-Fisher-Rao space, which yields an additional decrease on the local
functional dissipation. GAD-PVI is compatible with different dissimilarity
functionals and associated smoothing approaches under three information
metrics. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the
faster convergence and reduced approximation error of GAD-PVI methods over the
state-of-the-art.