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#1 Near-Optimality of Contrastive Divergence Algorithms [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Pierre Glaser, Kevin Han Huang, Arthur Gretton

We provide a non-asymptotic analysis of the contrastive divergence (CD) algorithm, a training method for unnormalized models. While prior work has established that (for exponential family distributions) the CD iterates asymptotically converge at an $O(n^{-1 / 3})$ rate to the true parameter of the data distribution, we show that CD can achieve the parametric rate $O(n^{-1 / 2})$. Our analysis provides results for various data batching schemes, including fully online and minibatch. We additionally show that CD is near-optimal, in the sense that its asymptotic variance is close to the Cramér-Rao lower bound.

Subject: NeurIPS.2024 - Poster