IsingFormer: Augmenting Parallel Tempering With Learned Proposals
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) underlies both statistical physics and combinatorial optimization, but mixes slowly near critical points and in rough landscapes. Parallel Tempering (PT) improves mixing by swapping replicas across temperatures, yet each replica still relies on slow local updates to change its configuration. We introduce IsingFormer, a Transformer trained on equilibrium samples that can generate entire spin configurations resembling those from the target distribution. These uncorrelated samples are used as proposals for global moves within a Metropolis step in PT, complementing the usual single-spin flips. On 2D Ising models (sampling), IsingFormer reproduces magnetization and free-energy curves and generalizes to unseen temperatures, including the critical region. Injecting even a single proposal sharply reduces equilibration time, replacing thousands of local updates. On 3D spin glasses (optimization), PT enhanced with IsingFormer finds substantially lower-energy states, demonstrating how global moves accelerate search in rugged landscapes. Finally, applied to integer factorization encoded as Ising problems, IsingFormer trained on a limited set of semiprimes transfers successfully to unseen semiprimes, boosting success rates beyond the training distribution. Since factorization is a canonical hard benchmark, this ability to generalize across instances highlights the potential of learning proposals that move beyond single problems to entire families of instances. The IsingFormer demonstrates that Monte Carlo methods can be systematically accelerated by neural proposals that capture global structure, yielding faster sampling and stronger performance in combinatorial optimization.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
PAWL-Forced Simulated Tempering
In this short note, we show how the parallel adaptive Wang-Landau (PAWL) algorithm of Bornn et al. (2013) can be used to automate and improve simulated tempering algorithms. While Wang-Landau and other stochastic approxi…
Tempering by Subsampling
In this paper we demonstrate that tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers for Bayesian models by recursively subsampling observations without replacement can improve the performance of baseline samplers in terms of e…
Policy Gradients for Optimal Parallel Tempering MCMC
Parallel tempering is a meta-algorithm for Markov Chain Monte Carlo that uses multiple chains to sample from tempered versions of the target distribution, enhancing mixing in multi-modal distributions that are challengin…
Improved Bound for Mixing Time of Parallel Tempering
In the field of sampling algorithms, MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) methods are widely used when direct sampling is not possible. However, multimodality of target distributions often leads to slow convergence and mixing…
Surrogate-assisted parallel tempering for Bayesian neural learning
Due to the need for robust uncertainty quantification, Bayesian neural learning has gained attention in the era of deep learning and big data. Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) methods typically implement Bayesian inferenc…
Bayesian InferenceDecision MakingUncertainty Quantification