HMC and underdamped Langevin united in the unadjusted convex smooth case

Abstract: We consider a family of unadjusted generalized HMC samplers, which includes standard position HMC samplers and discretizations of the underdamped Langevin process. A detailed analysis and optimization of the parameters is conducted in the Gaussian case, which shows an improvement from $1/\kappa$ to $1/\sqrt{\kappa}$ for the convergence rate in terms of the condition number $\kappa$ by using partial velocity refreshment, with respect to classical full refreshments. A similar effect is observed empirically for two related algorithms, namely Metropolis-adjusted gHMC and kinetic piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. Then, a stochastic gradient version of the samplers is considered, for which dimension-free convergence rates are established for log-concave smooth targets over a large range of parameters, gathering in a unified framework previous results on position HMC and underdamped Langevin and extending them to HMC with inertia.