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Conventional wisdom in the sampling literature, backed by a popular diffusion scaling limit, suggests that the mixing time of the Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) scales as $O(d^{1/3})$, where $d$ is the dimension. However, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-24 Sinho Chewi , Chen Lu , Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Thibaut Le Gouic , Philippe Rigollet

Understanding the complexity of sampling from a strongly log-concave and log-smooth distribution $\pi$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ to high accuracy is a fundamental problem, both from a practical and theoretical standpoint. In practice, high-accuracy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-02-22 Jason M. Altschuler , Sinho Chewi

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

Langevin Dynamics is a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) central to sampling and generative modeling and is implemented via time discretization. Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), based on the Euler-Maruyama discretization, is the simplest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Saravanan Kandasamy , Dheeraj Nagaraj

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

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

In this work, we propose a first-order sampling method called the Metropolis-adjusted Preconditioned Langevin Algorithm for approximate sampling from a target distribution whose support is a proper convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Our…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-27 Vishwak Srinivasan , Andre Wibisono , Ashia Wilson

Langevin diffusion processes and their discretizations are often used for sampling from a target density. The most convenient framework for assessing the quality of such a sampling scheme corresponds to smooth and strongly log-concave…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-12-27 Arnak S. Dalalyan , Lionel Riou-Durand

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

Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers based on discretizations of (overdamped) Langevin dynamics are commonly used in the Bayesian inference and computational statistical physics literature to estimate high-dimensional integrals. One can…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-08-11 Tony Lelièvre , Régis Santet , Gabriel Stoltz

We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Difan Zou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

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

Acceleration is a celebrated cornerstone of convex optimization, enabling gradient-based algorithms to converge sublinearly in the condition number. A major open question is whether an analogous acceleration phenomenon is possible for…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Jason M. Altschuler , Sinho Chewi , Matthew S. Zhang

The Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) are popularly used to approximate Bayesian posterior distributions in statistical learning procedures with large-scale data. As opposed to many usual Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-30 Kexin Jin , Chenguang Liu , Jonas Latz

We consider the problem of sampling distributions stemming from non-convex potentials with Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA). We prove the stability of the discrete-time ULA to drift approximations under the assumption that the potential…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-01 Marien Renaud , Valentin De Bortoli , Arthur Leclaire , Nicolas Papadakis

This paper presents a new accelerated proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo methodology to perform Bayesian inference in imaging inverse problems with an underlying convex geometry. The proposed strategy takes the form of a stochastic relaxed…

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

An effective approach for sampling from unnormalized densities is based on the idea of gradually transporting samples from an easy prior to the complicated target distribution. Two popular methods are (1) Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), where…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-09 Junhua Chen , Lorenz Richter , Julius Berner , Denis Blessing , Gerhard Neumann , Anima Anandkumar

We consider the problem of sampling from a strongly log-concave density in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and prove a non-asymptotic upper bound on the mixing time of the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA). The method draws samples by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-12 Raaz Dwivedi , Yuansi Chen , Martin J. Wainwright , Bin Yu

The Metropolis-adjusted Langevin (MALA) algorithm is a sampling algorithm that incorporates the gradient of the logarithm of the target density in its proposal distribution. In an earlier joint work \citet{pill:stu:12}, the author had…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-15 Natesh S. Pillai