Adding new samplers to NumPyro
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- Dominant language
- Python
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Description
Feature Summary
Recently, a couple of samplers have been proposed by the group I work with (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01707, https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08549) as alternatives to NUTS HMC (see issue #1662
). Since they appear to be quite a bit faster than NUTS (at least on benchmark problems I've tried), and relatively simple, I'm interested in adding them to NumPyro, but wanted to get some advice.
Currently, implementations exist in Blackjax. In an ideal world, I'd make a new class like class AdjustedMicrocanonical(numpyro.infer.mcmc.MCMCKernel) which basically just wraps Blackjax.
In addition, my eventual goal would be to add not just the kernel, but also the tuning scheme (which is key to good performance). I'm curious if there's a straightforward way to do that.
Motivation
While it's easy to write a model in NumPyro and extract the density, then use Blackjax for inference, we want to give users more direct access (basically for the purpose of increasing discoverability).
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading issue #1662, the existing BlackJAX implementations, and NumPyro's MCMCKernel interface. Clarify how an AdjustedMicrocanonical wrapper should integrate with NumPyro and how the tuning scheme should be exposed. Done means an agreed implementation path for adding the sampler and tuning support.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- numpy, python
- Domain
- machine-learning
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 30/100