iSMART: An Iterative Sampling-and-Regression Technique for Solving Martingale-Based PDEs

We propose the {\bf i}terative {\bf S}a{\bf M}pling-{\bf A}nd-{\bf R}egression {\bf T}echnique (iSMART) for high-dimensional martingale-based partial differential equations (PDEs) in this paper. By leveraging the $L^2$-projection property of conditional expectation and adopting the stop-gradient technique, iSMART reformulates the continuous martingale condition derived from PDEs into a sequence of tractable sampling-regression problems within an iterative framework. This approach relies solely on standard SDE path simulation and plain squared-error loss minimization, completely bypassing the need for adversarial optimization or nested expectation estimation in previous methods. iSMART accommodates linear, semi-linear, and fully nonlinear martingale-based PDEs within a unified iterative procedure. In particular, for fully nonlinear Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations, a freezing-and-compensating technique is introduced to strategically shift a portion of the nonlinearity into the SDE drift, thereby improving the convergence behavior of the iterations. Numerous numerical experiments on linear reaction-diffusion equations with sharp gradients, semilinear Burgers-type equations, and fully nonlinear HJB equations demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed approach in various high dimensions.