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Related papers: A Langevin-like Sampler for Discrete Distributions

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While gradient-based discrete samplers are effective in sampling from complex distributions, they are susceptible to getting trapped in local minima, particularly in high-dimensional, multimodal discrete distributions, owing to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-21 Luxu Liang , Yuhang Jia , Feng Zhou

We study posterior sampling for inverse problems in discrete state spaces using discrete diffusion models as generative priors. While continuous diffusion models have become widely used for inverse problems, their discrete counterparts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Chaitanya Amballa , Sattwik Basu , Jorge Vančo Sampedro , Romit Roy Choudhury

Sampling from discrete distributions is a ubiquitous task in machine learning, recently revisited by the emergence of discrete diffusion models. While Langevin algorithms constitute the state of the art for continuous spaces, discrete…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Armand Gissler , Saeed Saremi , Francis Bach

We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Will Grathwohl , Kevin Swersky , Milad Hashemi , David Duvenaud , Chris J. Maddison

Sampling from flat modes in discrete spaces is a crucial yet underexplored problem. Flat modes represent robust solutions and have broad applications in combinatorial optimization and discrete generative modeling. However, existing sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Pinaki Mohanty , Riddhiman Bhattacharya , Ruqi Zhang

Various differentially private algorithms instantiate the exponential mechanism, and require sampling from the distribution $\exp(-f)$ for a suitable function $f$. When the domain of the distribution is high-dimensional, this sampling can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-18 Arun Ganesh , Kunal Talwar

In this paper we introduce a new sampling algorithm which has the potential to be adopted as a universal replacement to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. It is related to the slice sampler, and motivated by an algorithm which is…

Computation · Statistics 2020-10-19 Yanxin Li , Stephen G. Walker

Sampling from a target distribution induced by training data is central to Bayesian learning, with Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) serving as a key tool for scalable posterior sampling and decentralized variants enabling…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-18 Waheed U. Bajwa , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Mustafa Ali Kutbay , Lingjiong Zhu , Muhammad Zulqarnain

We study the problem of posterior sampling in discrete-state spaces using discrete diffusion models. While posterior sampling methods for continuous diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress, analogous methods for discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Wenda Chu , Zihui Wu , Yifan Chen , Yang Song , Yisong Yue

We propose and analyze a class of adaptive sampling algorithms for multimodal distributions on a bounded domain, which share a structural resemblance to the classic overdamped Langevin dynamics. We first demonstrate that this class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Björn Engquist , Kui Ren , Yunan Yang

Understanding the dimension dependency of computational complexity in high-dimensional sampling problem is a fundamental problem, both from a practical and theoretical perspective. Compared with samplers with unbiased stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Xunpeng Huang , Hanze Dong , Difan Zou , Tong Zhang

Sampling the parameter space of artificial neural networks according to a Boltzmann distribution provides insight into the geometry of low-loss solutions and offers an alternative to conventional loss minimization for training. However,…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-03-17 Alessandro Zambon , Francesca Caruso , Riccardo Zecchina , Guido Tiana

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

It is known that gradient-based MCMC samplers for continuous spaces, such as Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), can be derived as particle versions of a gradient flow that minimizes KL divergence on a Wasserstein manifold. The superior efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Haoran Sun , Hanjun Dai , Bo Dai , Haomin Zhou , Dale Schuurmans

We study Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from Gibbs distributions such that the potentials are dissipative and their weak gradients have finite moduli of continuity not necessarily convergent to zero. Our main result is a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-01 Shogo Nakakita

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

Stochastic gradients have been widely integrated into Langevin-based methods to improve their scalability and efficiency in solving large-scale sampling problems. However, the proximal sampler, which exhibits much faster convergence than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Xunpeng Huang , Difan Zou , Yi-An Ma , Hanze Dong , Tong Zhang

The problem of sampling a target probability distribution on a constrained domain arises in many applications including machine learning. For constrained sampling, various Langevin algorithms such as projected Langevin Monte Carlo (PLMC),…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-07 Yingli Wang , Changwei Tu , Xiaoyu Wang , Lingjiong Zhu

This paper deals with Gibbs samplers that include high dimensional conditional Gaussian distributions. It proposes an efficient algorithm that avoids the high dimensional Gaussian sampling and relies on a random excursion along a small set…

Computation · Statistics 2016-04-20 Olivier Féron , François Orieux , Jean-François Giovannelli

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Paul Fearnhead , Sebastiano Grazzi , Chris Nemeth , Gareth O. Roberts
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