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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

Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, the canonical Euler Maruyama discretization of the Langevin diffusion process, referred as Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA),…

Computation · Statistics 2021-07-28 Dao Nguyen , Xin Dang , Yixin Chen

We consider the problem of sampling from a density of the form $p(x) \propto \exp(-f(x)- g(x))$, where $f: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is a smooth and strongly convex function and $g: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-02 Wenlong Mou , Nicolas Flammarion , Martin J. Wainwright , Peter L. Bartlett

We study sampling problems associated with non-convex potentials that meanwhile lack smoothness. In particular, we consider target distributions that satisfy either logarithmic-Sobolev inequality or Poincar\'e inequality. Rather than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jiaming Liang , Yongxin Chen

We study three kinetic Langevin samplers including the Euler discretization, the BU and the UBU splitting scheme. We provide contraction results in $L^1$-Wasserstein distance for non-convex potentials. These results are based on a carefully…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-08-20 Katharina Schuh , Peter A. Whalley

The likelihood function is a fundamental component in Bayesian statistics. However, evaluating the likelihood of an observation is computationally intractable in many applications. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric approximation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Viet Anh Nguyen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Man-Chung Yue , Daniel Kuhn , Wolfram Wiesemann

We study the problem of sampling from a target distribution in $\mathbb{R}^d$ whose potential is not smooth. Compared with the sampling problem with smooth potentials, this problem is much less well-understood due to the lack of smoothness.…

Computation · Statistics 2023-07-25 Jiaojiao Fan , Bo Yuan , Jiaming Liang , Yongxin Chen

We study sampling problems associated with potentials that lack smoothness. The potentials can be either convex or non-convex. Departing from the standard smooth setting, the potentials are only assumed to be weakly smooth or non-smooth, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Jiaming Liang , Yongxin Chen

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

In this work, we examine sampling problems with non-smooth potentials. We propose a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from non-smooth potentials. We provide a non-asymptotical analysis of our algorithm and establish a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Jiaming Liang , Yongxin Chen

An Euler discretization of the Langevin diffusion is known to converge to the global minimizers of certain convex and non-convex optimization problems. We show that this property holds for any suitably smooth diffusion and that different…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-30 Murat A. Erdogdu , Lester Mackey , Ohad Shamir

This paper deals with a method for the approximation of a spectral density function among the solutions of a generalized moment problem a` la Byrnes/Georgiou/Lindquist. The approximation is pursued with respect to the Kullback-Leibler…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2009-11-04 Augusto Ferrante , Federico Ramponi , Francesco Ticozzi

Motivated by the computation of the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) and the Bayesian posterior in statistics, this paper explores the problem of convex optimization over the space of all probability distributions. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-11-03 Rentian Yao , Linjun Huang , Yun Yang

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

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

We study the problem of sampling from a target distribution $\pi(q)\propto e^{-U(q)}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $U$ can be non-convex, via the Hessian-free high-resolution (HFHR) dynamics, which is a second-order Langevin-type process that…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Xiaoyu Wang , Yingli Wang , Lingjiong Zhu

We consider convex optimization with non-smooth objective function and log-concave sampling with non-smooth potential (negative log density). In particular, we study two specific settings where the convex objective/potential function is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-13 Jiaming Liang , Yongxin Chen

The development of efficient sampling algorithms catering to non-Euclidean geometries has been a challenging endeavor, as discretization techniques which succeed in the Euclidean setting do not readily carry over to more general settings.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Sivakanth Gopi , Yin Tat Lee , Daogao Liu , Ruoqi Shen , Kevin Tian

In this paper, we provide non-asymptotic upper bounds on the error of sampling from a target density using three schemes of discretized Langevin diffusions. The first scheme is the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm, the Euler…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Arnak S. Dalalyan , Avetik Karagulyan , Lionel Riou-Durand

We study density estimation in Kullback-Leibler divergence: given an i.i.d. sample from an unknown density $p^\star$, the goal is to construct an estimator $\widehat{p}$ such that $\mathrm{KL}(p^\star,\widehat{p})$ is small with high…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Spencer Compton , Gábor Lugosi , Jaouad Mourtada , Jian Qian , Nikita Zhivotovskiy
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