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While the Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) is a popular and widely used Markov chain Monte Carlo method, very few papers derive conditions that ensure its convergence. In particular, to the authors' knowledge, assumptions that…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-07 Alain Durmus , Éric Moulines

In this paper, we propose a new numerical method for the underdamped Langevin diffusion (ULD) and present a non-asymptotic analysis of its sampling error in the 2-Wasserstein distance when the $d$-dimensional target distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Maximilian Scott , Dáire O'Kane , Andraž Jelinčič , James Foster

Sampling from score-based diffusion models incurs bias due to both time discretisation and the approximation of the score function. A common strategy for reducing this bias is to apply corrector steps based on the unadjusted Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Kevin H. Lam , Tyler Farghly , Christopher Williams , Jun Yang , Yee Whye Teh , Arnaud Doucet

The unadjusted Langevin algorithm is widely used for sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions. It is well known to be biased, with the bias typically scaling linearly with the dimension when measured in squared Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-11 Daniel Lacker , Fuzhong Zhou

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) ensures strong guarantees with regards to convergence in measure for sampling log-concave posterior distributions by adding noise to stochastic gradient iterates. Given the size of many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Bapi Chatterjee , Dan Alistarh

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a powerful algorithm for optimizing a non-convex objective, where a controlled and properly scaled Gaussian noise is added to the stochastic gradients to steer the iterates towards a global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-04 Yuanhan Hu , Xiaoyu Wang , Xuefeng Gao , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu

Mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional defined over the space of probability distributions. MFLD has gained attention due to its connection with noisy gradient descent for mean-field…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Atsushi Nitanda

We propose a new policy gradient method, named homotopic policy mirror descent (HPMD), for solving discounted, infinite horizon MDPs with finite state and action spaces. HPMD performs a mirror descent type policy update with an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

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

Langevin Dynamics is a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) central to sampling and generative modeling and is implemented via time discretization. Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), based on the Euler-Maruyama discretization, is the simplest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Saravanan Kandasamy , Dheeraj Nagaraj

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

It is well known in many settings that reversible Langevin diffusions in confining potentials converge to equilibrium exponentially fast. Adding irreversible perturbations to the drift of a Langevin diffusion that maintain the same…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-02 Michela Ottobre , Natesh S. Pillai , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

We study two variants of the mirror descent-ascent (MDA) algorithm for solving min-max problems on the space of measures: simultaneous and alternating. We work under assumptions of convexity-concavity and relative smoothness of the payoff…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-08 Razvan-Andrei Lascu , Mateusz B. Majka , Łukasz Szpruch

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

We present a primal only derivation of Mirror Descent as a "partial" discretization of gradient flow on a Riemannian manifold where the metric tensor is the Hessian of the Mirror Descent potential. We contrast this discretization to Natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Suriya Gunasekar , Blake Woodworth , Nathan Srebro

Learning-to-optimize is an emerging framework that seeks to speed up the solution of certain optimization problems by leveraging training data. Learned optimization solvers have been shown to outperform classical optimization algorithms in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-27 Hong Ye Tan , Subhadip Mukherjee , Junqi Tang , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

We study learning to learn for regression problems through the lens of hyperparameter tuning. We propose the Langevin Gradient Descent Algorithm (LGD), which approximates the mean of the posterior distribution defined by the loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Saumya Goyal , Rohith Rongali , Ritabrata Ray , Barnabás Póczos

A new (unadjusted) Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm with improved rates in total variation and in Wasserstein distance is presented. All these are obtained in the context of sampling from a target distribution $\pi$ that has a density…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-18 Sotirios Sabanis , Ying Zhang

Langevin algorithms are gradient descent methods with additive noise. They have been used for decades in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, optimization, and learning. Their convergence properties for unconstrained non-convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Andrew Lamperski

Underdamped Langevin dynamics (ULD) is a widely-used sampler for Gibbs distributions $\pi\propto e^{-V}$, and is often empirically effective in high dimensions. However, existing non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for discretized ULD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Shiyuan Zhang , Qiwei Di , Xuheng Li , Quanquan Gu