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We establish conditions under which Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithms with a position-dependent proposal covariance matrix will or will not have the geometric rate of convergence. Some of the diffusions based MH algorithms like the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-23 Vivekananda Roy , Lijin Zhang

Sampling from heavy-tailed and multimodal distributions is challenging when neither the target density nor the proposal density can be evaluated, as in $\alpha$-stable L\'evy-driven fractional Langevin algorithms. While the target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Ahmed Aloui , Junyi Liao , Ali Hasan , Jose Blanchet , Vahid Tarokh

In this article, we study the problem of sampling from distributions whose densities are not necessarily smooth nor logconcave. We propose a simple Langevin-based algorithm that does not rely on popular but computationally challenging…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Tim Johnston , Iosif Lytras , Nikolaos Makras , Sotirios Sabanis

In this paper, we propose irreversible versions of the Metropolis Hastings (MH) and Metropolis adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) with a main focus on the latter. For the former, we show how one can simply switch between different proposal…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-03-14 Yi-An Ma , Emily B. Fox , Tianqi Chen , Lei Wu

This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-21 Nahom Seyoum , Haoxiang You

There has been considerable interest in designing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms by exploiting numerical methods for Langevin dynamics, which includes Hamiltonian dynamics as a deterministic case. A prominent approach is Hamiltonian…

Computation · Statistics 2021-06-08 Zexi Song , Zhiqiang Tan

Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…

Computation · Statistics 2024-04-01 Riddhiman Bhattacharya , Tiefeng Jiang

Normalizing flows (NF) use a continuous generator to map a simple latent (e.g. Gaussian) distribution, towards an empirical target distribution associated with a training data set. Once trained by minimizing a variational objective, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-23 Florentin Coeurdoux , Nicolas Dobigeon , Pierre Chainais

In this paper, we provide new insights on the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm. We show that this method can be formulated as a first order optimization algorithm of an objective functional defined on the Wasserstein space of order $2$. Using…

Computation · Statistics 2018-03-30 Alain Durmus , Szymon Majewski , Błażej Miasojedow

Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods augmented with additive noise, and are widely used in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and machine learning. In recent years, the non-asymptotic analysis of Langevin…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Yuping Zheng , Andrew Lamperski

We study sampling as optimization in the space of measures. We focus on gradient flow-based optimization with the Langevin dynamics as a case study. We investigate the source of the bias of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-06-08 Andre Wibisono

Metropolis algorithms are classical tools for sampling from target distributions, with broad applications in statistics and scientific computing. Their convergence speed is governed by the spectral gap of the associated Markov operator.…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Shuigen Liu , Xin T. Tong

In this paper we consider a new probability sampling methods based on Langevin diffusion dynamics to resolve the problem of existing Monte Carlo algorithms when draw samples from high dimensional target densities. We extent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Z. Zarezadeh , N. Zarezadeh

We establish sample complexity guarantees for estimating the covariance matrix of a strongly log-concave smooth distribution using the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA). We quantitatively compare our complexity estimates on single-chain…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-02-16 Shogo Nakakita

Sampling from a target distribution is a fundamental problem. Traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, such as the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA), derived from the overdamped Langevin dynamics, have been extensively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-29 Xinzhe Zuo , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

Langevin dynamics (LD) has been proven to be a powerful technique for optimizing a non-convex objective as an efficient algorithm to find local minima while eventually visiting a global minimum on longer time-scales. LD is based on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-06 Xuefeng Gao , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu

The usage of positive definite metric tensors derived from second derivative information in the context of the simplified manifold Metropolis adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) is explored. A new adaptive step length procedure that resolves…

Computation · Statistics 2015-09-03 Tore Selland Kleppe

Various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are studied to improve upon random walk Metropolis sampling, for simulation from complex distributions. Examples include Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and…

Computation · Statistics 2020-05-19 Zexi Song , Zhiqiang Tan

We study the problem of approximate sampling from non-log-concave distributions, e.g., Gaussian mixtures, which is often challenging even in low dimensions due to their multimodality. We focus on performing this task via Markov chain Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-30 Tim Tsz-Kit Lau , Han Liu , Thomas Pock

Latent Gaussian processes are widely applied in many fields like, statistics, inverse problems and machine learning. A popular method for inference is through the posterior distribution, which is typically carried out by Markov Chain Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2018-04-16 Jonas Wallin , Sreekar Vadlamani