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

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Sampling with Markov chain Monte Carlo methods often amounts to discretizing some continuous-time dynamics with numerical integration. In this paper, we establish the convergence rate of sampling algorithms obtained by discretizing smooth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-04 Xuechen Li , Denny Wu , Lester Mackey , Murat A. Erdogdu

Langevin diffusion is a commonly used tool for sampling from a given distribution. In this work, we establish that when the target density $p^*$ is such that $\log p^*$ is $L$ smooth and $m$ strongly convex, discrete Langevin diffusion…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-02 Xiang Cheng , Peter Bartlett

We study the Riemannian Langevin Algorithm for the problem of sampling from a distribution with density $\nu$ with respect to the natural measure on a manifold with metric $g$. We assume that the target density satisfies a log-Sobolev…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Khashayar Gatmiry , Santosh S. Vempala

We derive explicit bounds for the computation of normalizing constants $Z$ for log-concave densities $\pi = \exp(-U)/Z$ with respect to the Lebesgue measure on $\mathbb{R}^d$. Our approach relies on a Gaussian annealing combined with recent…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-03-01 Nicolas Brosse , Alain Durmus , Éric Moulines

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

We study regression of $1$-Lipschitz functions under a log-concave measure $\mu$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We focus on the high-dimensional regime where the sample size $n$ is subexponential in $d$, in which distribution-free estimators are…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-09-15 Pierre Bizeul , Boaz Klartag

We study the problem of differentially private stochastic convex optimization (DP-SCO) with heavy-tailed gradients, where we assume a $k^{\text{th}}$-moment bound on the Lipschitz constants of sample functions rather than a uniform bound.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Hilal Asi , Daogao Liu , Kevin Tian

The $L^k$-Wasserstein distance $\mathbb{W}_k (k\ge 1)$ and the probability distance $\mathbb{W}_\psi$ induced by a concave function $\psi$, are estimated between different diffusion processes with singular coefficients. As applications, the…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Xing Huang , Panpan Ren , Feng-Yu Wang

Log-concave sampling has witnessed remarkable algorithmic advances in recent years, but the corresponding problem of proving lower bounds for this task has remained elusive, with lower bounds previously known only in dimension one. In this…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Sinho Chewi , Jaume de Dios Pont , Jerry Li , Chen Lu , Shyam Narayanan

We study the mixing time of the Dikin walk in a polytope - a random walk based on the log-barrier from the interior point method literature. This walk, and a close variant, were studied by Narayanan (2016) and Kannan-Narayanan (2012).…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-08-10 Sushant Sachdeva , Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

We study the problem of "isotropically rounding" a polytope $K\subset\mathbb{R}^n$, that is, computing a linear transformation which makes the uniform distribution on the polytope have roughly identity covariance matrix. We assume $K$ is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Oren Mangoubi , Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

We consider the problem of optimizing an approximately convex function over a bounded convex set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ using only function evaluations. The problem is reduced to sampling from an \emph{approximately} log-concave distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Alexandre Belloni , Tengyuan Liang , Hariharan Narayanan , Alexander Rakhlin

We propose a new discretization of the mirror-Langevin diffusion and give a crisp proof of its convergence. Our analysis uses relative convexity/smoothness and self-concordance, ideas which originated in convex optimization, together with a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-10-26 Kwangjun Ahn , Sinho Chewi

We investigate threshold phenomena for random polytopes $K_N=\conv\{X_1,\dots,X_N\}$ generated by i.i.d.\ samples from an atomic law $\mu$. We identify and provide a missing justification in the discrete-hypercube threshold argument of…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-23 Silouanos Brazitikos , Minas Pafis

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

Running a random walk in a convex body $K\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$ is a standard approach to sample approximately uniformly from the body. The requirement is that from a suitable initial distribution, the distribution of the walk comes close…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Hariharan Narayanan , Amit Rajaraman , Piyush Srivastava

Under general assumptions on the target distribution $p^\star$, we establish a sharp Lipschitz regularity theory for flow-matching vector fields and diffusion-model scores, with optimal dependence on time and dimension. As applications, we…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Arthur Stéphanovitch

We prove tight mixing time bounds for natural random walks on bases of matroids, determinantal distributions, and more generally distributions associated with log-concave polynomials. For a matroid of rank $k$ on a ground set of $n$…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Nima Anari , Kuikui Liu , Shayan Oveis Gharan , Cynthia Vinzant , Thuy Duong Vuong

Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-23 Dao Nguyen

Sampling is a fundamental and arguably very important task with numerous applications in Machine Learning. One approach to sample from a high dimensional distribution $e^{-f}$ for some function $f$ is the Langevin Algorithm (LA). Recently,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Xiao Wang , Qi Lei , Ioannis Panageas