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Related papers: Sampling from Log-Concave Distributions with Infin…

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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.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-24 Adam Gustafson , Hariharan Narayanan

Elliptical slice sampling is a widely used gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is tuning-free and capable of adapting to local characteristics of the target distribution. However, its primary limitation is that sampling…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-22 Nicholas Marco , Surya T. Tokdar

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

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…

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

Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-26 Niladri S. Chatterji , Jelena Diakonikolas , Michael I. Jordan , Peter L. Bartlett

Most approximation algorithms for #P-complete problems (e.g., evaluating the permanent of a matrix or the volume of a polytope) work by reduction to the problem of approximate sampling from a distribution $\pi$ over a large set $\S$. This…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-11-09 Peter C. Richter

We consider the task of estimating the entropy of $k$-ary distributions from samples in the streaming model, where space is limited. Our main contribution is an algorithm that requires $O\left(\frac{k \log…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Jayadev Acharya , Sourbh Bhadane , Piotr Indyk , Ziteng Sun

The problem of sampling according to the probability distribution minimizing a given free energy, using interacting particles unadjusted kinetic Langevin Monte Carlo, is addressed. In this setting, three sources of error arise, related to…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-12-05 Pierre Monmarché , Katharina Schuh

We study the problem of parallelizing sampling from distributions related to determinants: symmetric, nonsymmetric, and partition-constrained determinantal point processes, as well as planar perfect matchings. For these distributions, the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Nima Anari , Callum Burgess , Kevin Tian , Thuy-Duong Vuong

Sampling from Gibbs distributions and computing their log-partition function are fundamental tasks in statistics, machine learning, and statistical physics. While efficient algorithms are known for log-concave densities, the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 David Holzmüller , Francis Bach

In this paper, we study the problem of finding the Euclidean distance to a convex cone generated by a set of discrete points in $\mathbb{R}^n_+$. In particular, we are interested in problems where the discrete points are the set of feasible…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-04-24 Ali Fattahi , Sriram Dasu , Reza Ahmadi

We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to generate samples from probability distributions supported on a $d$-dimensional lattice $\Lambda = \mathbf{B}\mathbb{Z}^d$, where $\mathbf{B}$ is a full-rank matrix. Specifically,…

Computation · Statistics 2021-01-27 Anand Jerry George , Navin Kashyap

In this work, we address the problem of approximating the $k$-disc distribution ("frequency vector") of a bounded-degree graph in sublinear-time under the assumption of hyperfiniteness. We revisit the partition-oracle framework of Hassidim,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Gregory Moroie

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

We propose a unified framework for likelihood-based regression modeling when the response variable has finite support. Our work is motivated by the fact that, in practice, observed data are discrete and bounded. The proposed methods assume…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-13 Karl Oskar Ekvall , Matteo Bottai

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 present a faster algorithm to generate a warm start for sampling an arbitrary logconcave density specified by an evaluation oracle, leading to the first sub-cubic sampling algorithms for inputs in (near-)isotropic position. A long line…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Yunbum Kook , Santosh S. Vempala

We study the proximal sampler of Lee, Shen, and Tian (2021) and obtain new convergence guarantees under weaker assumptions than strong log-concavity: namely, our results hold for (1) weakly log-concave targets, and (2) targets satisfying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Yongxin Chen , Sinho Chewi , Adil Salim , Andre Wibisono

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