Dynamics of Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference: A Case Study in 2D Ising Models

Variational algorithms have gained prominence over the past two decades as a scalable computational environment for Bayesian inference. In this article, we explore tools from the dynamical systems literature to study the convergence of coordinate ascent algorithms for mean field variational inference. Focusing on the Ising model defined on two nodes, we fully characterize the dynamics of the sequential coordinate ascent algorithm and its parallel version. We observe that in the regime where the objective function is convex, both the algorithms are stable and exhibit convergence to the unique fixed point. Our analyses reveal interesting discordances between these two versions of the algorithm in the region when the objective function is non-convex. In fact, the parallel version exhibits a periodic oscillatory behavior which is absent in the sequential version. Drawing intuition from the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature, we empirically show that a parameter expansion of the Ising model, popularly called the Edward-Sokal coupling, leads to an enlargement of the regime of convergence to the global optima.