English

Fast parallel sampling under isoperimetry

Data Structures and Algorithms 2024-01-18 v1 Statistics Theory Machine Learning Statistics Theory

Abstract

We show how to sample in parallel from a distribution π\pi over Rd\mathbb R^d that satisfies a log-Sobolev inequality and has a smooth log-density, by parallelizing the Langevin (resp. underdamped Langevin) algorithms. We show that our algorithm outputs samples from a distribution π^\hat\pi that is close to π\pi in Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence (resp. total variation (TV) distance), while using only log(d)O(1)\log(d)^{O(1)} parallel rounds and O~(d)\widetilde{O}(d) (resp. O~(d)\widetilde O(\sqrt d)) gradient evaluations in total. This constitutes the first parallel sampling algorithms with TV distance guarantees. For our main application, we show how to combine the TV distance guarantees of our algorithms with prior works and obtain RNC sampling-to-counting reductions for families of discrete distribution on the hypercube {±1}n\{\pm 1\}^n that are closed under exponential tilts and have bounded covariance. Consequently, we obtain an RNC sampler for directed Eulerian tours and asymmetric determinantal point processes, resolving open questions raised in prior works.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.09016,
  title  = {Fast parallel sampling under isoperimetry},
  author = {Nima Anari and Sinho Chewi and Thuy-Duong Vuong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.09016},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

23 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:18:59.511Z