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Related papers: Sampling from Log-Concave Distributions over Polyt…

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We study the {\em robust proper learning} of univariate log-concave distributions (over continuous and discrete domains). Given a set of samples drawn from an unknown target distribution, we want to compute a log-concave hypothesis…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

Classically, the continuous-time Langevin diffusion converges exponentially fast to its stationary distribution $\pi$ under the sole assumption that $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality. Using this fact to provide guarantees for the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-07-11 Sinho Chewi , Murat A. Erdogdu , Mufan Bill Li , Ruoqi Shen , Matthew Zhang

We propose a computationally efficient random walk on a convex body which rapidly mixes and closely tracks a time-varying log-concave distribution. We develop general theoretical guarantees on the required number of steps; this number can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-09-25 Hariharan Narayanan , Alexander Rakhlin

We introduce the geodesic walk for sampling Riemannian manifolds and apply it to the problem of generating uniform random points from polytopes in R^n specified by m inequalities. The walk is a discrete-time simulation of a stochastic…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Yin Tat Lee , Santosh S. Vempala

We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\mu$ with density $\propto e^{-V}$ for some potential function $V:\mathbb R^d\to \mathbb R$ with query access to $V$ and $\nabla V$. We start with the following standard assumptions: (1)…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yuchen He , Zhehan Lei , Jianan Shao , Chihao Zhang

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

We present algorithms for diffusion model sampling which obtain $\delta$-error in $\mathrm{polylog}(1/\delta)$ steps, given access to $\widetilde O(\delta)$-accurate score estimates in $L^2$. This is an exponential improvement over all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Fan Chen , Sinho Chewi , Constantinos Daskalakis , Alexander Rakhlin

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

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

A key task in Bayesian statistics is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). However, without any assumptions, sampling (even approximately) can be #P-hard, and few…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-03 Rong Ge , Holden Lee , Andrej Risteski

We study the problem of estimating multivariate log-concave probability density functions. We prove the first sample complexity upper bound for learning log-concave densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$, for all $d \geq 1$. Prior to our work, no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-07 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

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

Let $K$ be a convex body in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and $f : \partial K \rightarrow \mathbb{R}_+$ a continuous, strictly positive function with $\int\limits_{\partial K} f(x) d \mu_{\partial K}(x) = 1$. We give an upper bound for the approximation…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2017-07-07 Julian Grote , Elisabeth M. Werner

We address the problem of minimizing a convex smooth function $f(x)$ over a compact polyhedral set $D$ given a stochastic zeroth-order constraint feedback model. This problem arises in safety-critical machine learning applications, such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-10 Ilnura Usmanova , Andreas Krause , Maryam Kamgarpour

Let $\{P_{\theta}:\theta \in {\mathbb R}^d\}$ be a log-concave location family with $P_{\theta}(dx)=e^{-V(x-\theta)}dx,$ where $V:{\mathbb R}^d\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ is a known convex function and let $X_1,\dots, X_n$ be i.i.d. r.v. sampled…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-08-03 Vladimir Koltchinskii , Martin Wahl

We revisit the problem of sampling from a target distribution that has a smooth strongly log-concave density everywhere in $\mathbb R^p$. In this context, if no additional density information is available, the randomized midpoint…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-06-19 Lu Yu , Avetik Karagulyan , Arnak Dalalyan

A key task in Bayesian machine learning is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). One prevalent example of this is sampling posteriors in parametric distributions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Rong Ge , Holden Lee , Andrej Risteski

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

We introduce Reflective Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (ReHMC), an HMC-based algorithm, to sample from a log-concave distribution restricted to a convex body. We prove that, starting from a warm start, the walk mixes to a log-concave target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-30 Apostolos Chalkis , Vissarion Fisikopoulos , Marios Papachristou , Elias Tsigaridas

A canonical algorithm for log-concave sampling is the Langevin Algorithm, aka the Langevin Diffusion run with some discretization stepsize $\eta > 0$. This discretization leads the Langevin Algorithm to have a stationary distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-22 Jason M. Altschuler , Kunal Talwar