bandits for doubly intractable posteriors

Last Friday, Guanyang Wang arXived a paper on the use of multi-armed bandits (hence the reference to the three bandits) to handle intractable normalising constants. The bandit compares or mixes Møller et al. (2006) auxiliary variable solution with Murray et al. (2006) exchange algorithm. Which are both special cases of pseudo-marginal MCMC algorithms. In both cases, the auxiliary variables produce an unbiased estimator of the ratio of the constants. Rather than the ratio of two unbiased estimators as in the more standard pseudo-marginal MCMC. The current paper tries to compare the two approaches based on the variance of the ratio estimate, but cannot derive a general ordering. The multi-armed bandit algorithm exploits both estimators of the acceptance ratio to pick the one that is almost the largest, almost because there is a correction for validating the step by detailed balance. The bandit acceptance probability is the maximum [over the methods] of the minimum [over the time directions] of the original acceptance ratio. While this appears to be valid, note that the resulting algorithm implies four times as many auxiliary variates as the original ones, which makes me wonder at the gain when compared with a parallel implementation of these methods, coupled at random times. (The fundamental difficulty of simulating from likelihoods with an unknown normalising constant remains, see p.4.)