  Scalable Bayesian sampling is playing an important role in modern machine
learning, especially in the fast-developed unsupervised-(deep)-learning models.
While tremendous progresses have been achieved via scalable Bayesian sampling
such as stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient
descent (SVGD), the generated samples are typically highly correlated.
Moreover, their sample-generation processes are often criticized to be
inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel self-adversarial learning
framework that automatically learns a conditional generator to mimic the
behavior of a Markov kernel (transition kernel). High-quality samples can be
efficiently generated by direct forward passes though a learned generator. Most
importantly, the learning process adopts a self-learning paradigm, requiring no
information on existing Markov kernels, e.g., knowledge of how to draw samples
from them. Specifically, our framework learns to use current samples, either
from the generator or pre-provided training data, to update the generator such
that the generated samples progressively approach a target distribution, thus
it is called self-learning. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets
verify advantages of our framework, outperforming related methods in terms of
both sampling efficiency and sample quality.
