A proximal gradient algorithm for composite log-concave sampling
Statistics Theory
2026-05-13 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Abstract
We propose an algorithm to sample from composite log-concave distributions over , i.e., densities of the form , assuming access to gradient evaluations of and a restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO) for . The latter requirement means that we can easily sample from the density , which is the sampling analogue of the proximal operator for . If is -strongly convex and is -smooth, our sampler achieves error in total variation distance in iterations where , which matches prior state-of-the-art results for the case . We further extend our results to cases where (1) is non-log-concave but satisfies a Poincar\'e or log-Sobolev inequality, and (2) is non-smooth but Lipschitz.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.12461,
title = {A proximal gradient algorithm for composite log-concave sampling},
author = {Linghai Liu and Sinho Chewi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.12461},
year = {2026}
}