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Langevin Dynamics has been extensively employed in global non-convex optimization due to the concentration of its stationary distribution around the global minimum of the potential function at low temperatures. In this paper, we propose to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-22 Ryo Fujino

Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-15 Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Lin Xiao

We study the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$ on $\rset^d$ which has a density \wrt\ the Lebesgue measure known up to a normalization factor $x \mapsto \rme^{-U(x)} / \int_{\rset^d} \rme^{-U(y)} \rmd y$. We analyze…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-17 M. Barkhagen , N. H. Chau , É. Moulines , M. Rásonyi , S. Sabanis , Y. Zhang

We propose discrete Langevin proposal (DLP), a simple and scalable gradient-based proposal for sampling complex high-dimensional discrete distributions. In contrast to Gibbs sampling-based methods, DLP is able to update all coordinates in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Ruqi Zhang , Xingchao Liu , Qiang Liu

We develop an efficient sampling method by simulating Langevin dynamics with an artificial force rather than a natural force by using the gradient of the potential energy. The standard technique for sampling following the predetermined…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-09-30 M. Ohzeki , A. Ichiki

We study the simulated annealing algorithm based on the kinetic Langevin dynamics, in order to find the global minimum of a non-convex potential function. For both the continuous time formulation and a discrete time analogue, we obtain the…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-06-14 Xuedong He , Xiaolu Tan , Ruocheng Wu

Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-04 Lenaic Chizat

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a fundamental classification and dimension reduction method that achieves Bayes optimality under Gaussian mixture, but often struggles in high-dimensional settings where the covariance matrix cannot be…

Computation · Statistics 2026-04-06 Cencheng Shen , Yuexiao Dong

We consider a recently proposed class of MCMC methods which uses proximity maps instead of gradients to build proposal mechanisms which can be employed for both differentiable and non-differentiable targets. These methods have been shown to…

Computation · Statistics 2024-06-21 Francesca R. Crucinio , Alain Durmus , Pablo Jiménez , Gareth O. Roberts

Acceleration is a celebrated cornerstone of convex optimization, enabling gradient-based algorithms to converge sublinearly in the condition number. A major open question is whether an analogous acceleration phenomenon is possible for…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Jason M. Altschuler , Sinho Chewi , Matthew S. Zhang

We present the viewpoint that optimization problems encountered in machine learning can often be interpreted as minimizing a convex functional over a function space, but with a non-convex constraint set introduced by model parameterization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Yongqiang Cai , Qianxiao Li , Zuowei Shen

We present a unified framework to analyze the global convergence of Langevin dynamics based algorithms for nonconvex finite-sum optimization with $n$ component functions. At the core of our analysis is a direct analysis of the ergodicity of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-20 Pan Xu , Jinghui Chen , Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

The preconditioned Metropolis adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) is a widely used method in statistical applications, where the choice of the preconditioning matrix plays a critical role. Recently, Titsias \cite{Titsias2024} demonstrated…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-03-13 Li-Li Wang , Guang-Hui Zheng

This paper considers mean square error (MSE) analysis for stochastic gradient sampling algorithms applied to underdamped Langevin dynamics under a global convexity assumption. A novel discrete Poisson equation framework is developed to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Jianfeng Lu , Xuda Ye , Zhennan Zhou

We propose a sampling method based on an ensemble approximation of second order Langevin dynamics. The log target density is appended with a quadratic term in an auxiliary momentum variable and damped-driven Hamiltonian dynamics introduced;…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-06-06 Ziming Liu , Andrew M. Stuart , Yixuan Wang

Simultaneous Localization and Planning (SLAP) under process and measurement uncertainties is a challenge. It involves solving a stochastic control problem modeled as a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) in a general…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Mohammadhussein Rafieisakhaei , Suman Chakravorty , P. R. Kumar

This work considers the problem of sampling from a probability distribution known up to a normalization constant while satisfying a set of statistical constraints specified by the expected values of general nonlinear functions. This problem…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-08 Luiz F. O. Chamon , Mohammad Reza Karimi , Anna Korba

Diffusion models are state-of-the-art methods in generative modeling when samples from a target probability distribution are available, and can be efficiently sampled, using score matching to estimate score vectors guiding a Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-21 Omar Chehab , Anna Korba

In this work, we propose a first-order sampling method called the Metropolis-adjusted Preconditioned Langevin Algorithm for approximate sampling from a target distribution whose support is a proper convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Our…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-27 Vishwak Srinivasan , Andre Wibisono , Ashia Wilson

It has been shown that the nonreversible overdamped Langevin dynamics enjoy better convergence properties in terms of spectral gap and asymptotic variance than the reversible one. In this article we propose a variance reduction method for…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-01-23 Romain Poncet