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Related papers: Query lower bounds for log-concave sampling

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We study the zeroth-order query complexity of sampling from a general logconcave distribution: given access to an evaluation oracle for a convex function $V:\mathbb{R}^{d}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}\cup\{\infty\}$, output a point from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Yunbum Kook , Santosh S. Vempala

We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 El Mehdi Saad , Wei-Cheng Lee , Francesco Orabona

Existing guarantees for algorithms sampling from nonlogconcave measures on $\mathbb{R}^d$ are generally inexplicit or unscalable. Even for the class of measures with logdensities that have bounded Hessians and are strongly concave outside a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-27 Martin Chak

Estimating the normalizing constant of an unnormalized probability distribution has important applications in computer science, statistical physics, machine learning, and statistics. In this work, we consider the problem of estimating the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Rong Ge , Holden Lee , Jianfeng Lu

In this paper, we investigate a continuous time version of the Stochastic Langevin Monte Carlo method, introduced in [WT11], that incorporates a stochastic sampling step inside the traditional over-damped Langevin diffusion. This method is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-10 Marelys Crespo Navas , Sébastien Gadat , Xavier Gendre

The log-concave projection is an operator that maps a d-dimensional distribution P to an approximating log-concave density. Prior work by D{\"u}mbgen et al. (2011) establishes that, with suitable metrics on the underlying spaces, this…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-22 Rina Foygel Barber , Richard J. Samworth

Motivated by applications to deep learning which often fail standard Lipschitz smoothness requirements, we examine the problem of sampling from distributions that are not log-concave and are only weakly dissipative, with log-gradients…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-29 Iosif Lytras , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

We prove a \emph{query complexity} lower bound on rank-one principal component analysis (PCA). We consider an oracle model where, given a symmetric matrix $M \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$, an algorithm is allowed to make $T$ \emph{exact}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-18 Max Simchowitz , Ahmed El Alaoui , Benjamin Recht

We prove an almost constant lower bound of the isoperimetric coefficient in the KLS conjecture. The lower bound has the dimension dependency $d^{-o_d(1)}$. When the dimension is large enough, our lower bound is tighter than the previous…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-01-14 Yuansi Chen

A well-known first-order method for sampling from log-concave probability distributions is the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA). This work proposes a new annealing step-size schedule for ULA, which allows to prove new convergence…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-03 Paul Rolland , Armin Eftekhari , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

In large-data applications, such as the inference process of diffusion models, it is desirable to design sampling algorithms with a high degree of parallelization. In this work, we study the adaptive complexity of sampling, which is the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Huanjian Zhou , Baoxiang Wang , Masashi Sugiyama

We consider the problem of estimating the support size of a distribution $D$. Our investigations are pursued through the lens of distribution testing and seek to understand the power of conditional sampling (denoted as COND), wherein one is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Diptarka Chakraborty , Gunjan Kumar , Kuldeep S. Meel

We consider the problem of sampling from a log-concave distribution $\pi(\theta) \propto e^{-f(\theta)}$ constrained to a polytope $K:=\{\theta \in \mathbb{R}^d: A\theta \leq b\}$, where $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times d}$ and $b \in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-09 Oren Mangoubi , Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

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

We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\target$ using the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm and provide rate of convergences for this algorithm in terms of Wasserstein distance of order $2$. Our result holds as long as the…

Computation · Statistics 2016-07-04 Thomas Bonis

It is well known that if a random vector satisfies a log-Sobolev inequality, all of its marginals have subgaussian tails. In the spirit of the KLS conjecture, we investigate whether this implication can be reversed under a log-concavity…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Pierre Bizeul

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

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 provide a first-order oracle complexity lower bound for finding stationary points of min-max optimization problems where the objective function is smooth, nonconvex in the minimization variable, and strongly concave in the maximization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-20 Haochuan Li , Yi Tian , Jingzhao Zhang , Ali Jadbabaie

In this paper, we revisit the recently established theoretical guarantees for the convergence of the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm of sampling from a smooth and (strongly) log-concave density. We improve the existing results when the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-07-31 Arnak S. Dalalyan