English

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 Rd\mathbb{R}^d, i.e., densities of the form πefg\pi\propto e^{-f-g}, assuming access to gradient evaluations of ff and a restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO) for gg. The latter requirement means that we can easily sample from the density RGOg,h,y(x)exp(g(x)12hyx2)\text{RGO}_{g,h,y}(x) \propto \exp(-g(x) -\frac{1}{2h}||y-x||^2), which is the sampling analogue of the proximal operator for gg. If f+gf + g is α\alpha-strongly convex and ff is β\beta-smooth, our sampler achieves ε\varepsilon error in total variation distance in O~(κdlog4(1/ε))\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\kappa \sqrt d \log^4(1/\varepsilon)) iterations where κ:=β/α\kappa := \beta/\alpha, which matches prior state-of-the-art results for the case g=0g=0. We further extend our results to cases where (1) π\pi is non-log-concave but satisfies a Poincar\'e or log-Sobolev inequality, and (2) ff is non-smooth but Lipschitz.

Keywords

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}
}