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We connect known results about diffusion limits of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to the Computer Science notion of algorithm complexity. Our main result states that any diffusion limit of a Markov process implies a…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-11-05 Gareth O. Roberts , Jeffrey S. Rosenthal

Sampling from a high-dimensional distribution is a fundamental task in statistics, engineering, and the sciences. A canonical approach is the Langevin Algorithm, i.e., the Markov chain for the discretized Langevin Diffusion. This is the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-01 Jason M. Altschuler , Kunal Talwar

Efficient sampling from complex and high dimensional target distributions turns out to be a fundamental task in diverse disciplines such as scientific computing, statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a new kind of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 Xiaojie Wang , Bin Yang

A well-known first-order method for sampling from log-concave probability distributions is the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA). This work proposes a new annealing step-size schedule for ULA, which allows to prove new convergence…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-03 Paul Rolland , Armin Eftekhari , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-02 Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus , Marcelo Pereyra , Ana F. Vidal

We investigate local MCMC algorithms, namely the random-walk Metropolis and the Langevin algorithms, and identify the optimal choice of the local step-size as a function of the dimension $n$ of the state space, asymptotically as…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-08-07 Alexandros Beskos , Gareth Roberts , Andrew Stuart

In order to solve tasks like uncertainty quantification or hypothesis tests in Bayesian imaging inverse problems, we often have to draw samples from the arising posterior distribution. For the usually log-concave but high-dimensional…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-23 Matthias J. Ehrhardt , Lorenz Kuger , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

In this paper, we prove large deviation principles for the empirical measures associated with the Independent Metropolis Hastings (IMH) sampler and the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA). These are the first large deviation…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Federica Milinanni , Pierre Nyquist

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a widely used sampler for continuous probability distributions. In many cases, the underlying Hamiltonian dynamics exhibit a phenomenon of resonance which decreases the efficiency of the algorithm and makes…

Computation · Statistics 2023-02-23 Lionel Riou-Durand , Pavel Sountsov , Jure Vogrinc , Charles C. Margossian , Sam Power

Standard first-order Langevin algorithms such as the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) are obtained by discretizing the Langevin diffusion and are widely used for sampling in machine learning because they scale to high dimensions and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-25 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Hoang M. Nguyen , Xicheng Zhang , Lingjiong Zhu

We aim to improve upon the exploration of the general-purpose random walk Metropolis algorithm when the target has non-convex support $A \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, by reusing proposals in $A^c$ which would otherwise be rejected. The algorithm…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-08-17 John Moriarty , Jure Vogrinc , Alessandro Zocca

Sampling from a high-dimensional probability distribution is a fundamental algorithmic task arising in wide-ranging applications across multiple disciplines, including scientific computing, computational statistics and machine learning.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Bin Yang , Xiaojie Wang

The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuri Kinoshita , Taiji Suzuki

Sampling from log-concave distributions is a well researched problem that has many applications in statistics and machine learning. We study the distributions of the form $p^{*}\propto\exp(-f(x))$, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-13 Ruoqi Shen , Yin Tat Lee

We propose a new algorithm---Stochastic Proximal Langevin Algorithm (SPLA)---for sampling from a log concave distribution. Our method is a generalization of the Langevin algorithm to potentials expressed as the sum of one stochastic smooth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-17 Adil Salim , Dmitry Kovalev , Peter Richtárik

We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Difan Zou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

This paper considers the optimal scaling problem for high-dimensional random walk Metropolis algorithms for densities which are differentiable in Lp mean but which may be irregular at some points (like the Laplace density for example)…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-04-25 Alain Durmus , Sylvain Le Corff , Eric Moulines , Gareth O. Roberts

We introduce new Gaussian proposals to improve the efficiency of the standard Hastings-Metropolis algorithm in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, used for the sampling from a target distribution in large dimension $d$. The improved…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2016-11-28 Alain Durmus , Gareth O. Roberts , Gilles Vilmart , Konstantinos C. Zygalakis

We propose a reflection-free Langevin framework for sampling and optimization on compact polyhedra. The method is based on the inverse Hessian of the logarithmic barrier, which defines a Dikin--Langevin diffusion whose drift and noise adapt…

Computation · Statistics 2026-03-17 James Chok , Domenic Petzinna

Bayesian methods of sampling from a posterior distribution are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to precisely display the uncertainty of a model fit. Classical methods based on iterative random sampling and posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-04 Jacopo Guidolin , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Ondřej Kuželka