Related papers: Geodesic Walks in Polytopes
We introduce a Markov chain for sampling from the uniform distribution on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$, which we call the $\textit{geodesic walk}$. We prove that the mixing time of this walk on any manifold with positive sectional…
We relate some basic constructions of stochastic analysis to differential geometry, via random walk approximations. We consider walks on both Riemannian and sub-Riemannian manifolds in which the steps consist of travel along either…
We consider weighted geodesic random walks in a complete Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$. We show that for almost all sequences of weights (with respect to a suitable measure), these weighted geodesic random walks satisfy, when suitably scaled,…
According to a version of Donsker's theorem, geodesic random walks on Riemannian manifolds converge to the respective Brownian motion. From a computational perspective, however, evaluating geodesics can be quite costly. We therefore…
The Euclidean space notion of convex sets (and functions) generalizes to Riemannian manifolds in a natural sense and is called geodesic convexity. Extensively studied computational problems such as convex optimization and sampling in convex…
We propose and analyze two new MCMC sampling algorithms, the Vaidya walk and the John walk, for generating samples from the uniform distribution over a polytope. Both random walks are sampling algorithms derived from interior point methods.…
We analyze Riemannian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RHMC) for sampling a polytope defined by $m$ inequalities in $\R^n$ endowed with the metric defined by the Hessian of a convex barrier function. The advantage of RHMC over Euclidean methods…
We study the mixing time of the Dikin walk in a polytope - a random walk based on the log-barrier from the interior point method literature. This walk, and a close variant, were studied by Narayanan (2016) and Kannan-Narayanan (2012).…
A closed equilateral random walk in 3-space is a selection of unit length vectors giving the steps of the walk conditioned on the assumption that the sum of the vectors is zero. The sample space of such walks with $n$ edges is the…
We consider the problem of sampling from a $d$-dimensional log-concave distribution $\pi(\theta) \propto \exp(-f(\theta))$ for $L$-Lipschitz $f$, constrained to a convex body with an efficiently computable self-concordant barrier function,…
Traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often struggle with sharp curvatures, intricate geometries, and multimodal distributions. Slice sampling can resolve local exploration inefficiency issues, and Riemannian geometries help…
We provide a direct proof of Cram\'er's theorem for geodesic random walks in a complete Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$. We show how to exploit the vector space structure of the tangent spaces to study large deviation properties of geodesic…
We present an affine-invariant random walk for drawing uniform random samples from a convex body $\mathcal{K} \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ that uses maximum volume inscribed ellipsoids, known as John's ellipsoids, for the proposal distribution.…
We study a family of mappings from the powers of the unit tangent sphere at a point to a complete Riemannian manifold with non-positive sectional curvature, whose behavior is related to the spherical mean operator and the geodesic random…
The aim of this work is to study the convergence to equilibrium of an $(h,\rho)$-subelliptic random walk on a closed, connected Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ associated with a subelliptic second-order differential operator $A$ on $M$. In such…
We study the problem of drawing samples from a logconcave distribution truncated on a polytope, motivated by computational challenges in Bayesian statistical models with indicator variables, such as probit regression. Building on interior…
For robots to work alongside humans and perform in unstructured environments, they must learn new motion skills and adapt them to unseen situations on the fly. This demands learning models that capture relevant motion patterns, while…
In many robot motion planning problems, task objectives and physical constraints induce non-Euclidean geometry on the configuration space, yet many planners operate using Euclidean distances that ignore this structure. We address the…
We analyze a variational time discretization of geodesic calculus on finite- and certain classes of infinite-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. We investigate the fundamental properties of discrete geodesics, the associated discrete…
Shape optimization is commonly applied in engineering to optimize shapes with respect to an objective functional relying on PDE solutions. In this paper, we view shape optimization as optimization on Riemannian shape manifolds. We consider…