Temperature and Friction Accelerated Sampling of Boltzmann-Gibbs Distribution

Abstract: This paper is concerned with tuning friction and temperature in Langevin dynamics for fast sampling from the canonical ensemble. We show that near-optimal acceleration is achieved by choosing friction so that the local quadratic approximation of the Hamiltonian is a critical damped oscillator. The system is also over-heated and cooled down to its final temperature. The performances of different cooling schedules are analyzed as functions of total simulation time.