Related papers: Bounding Fastest Mixing
Recently, Eldan, Koehler, and Zeitouni (2020) showed that Glauber dynamics mixes rapidly for general Ising models so long as the difference between the largest and smallest eigenvalues of the coupling matrix is at most $1 - \epsilon$ for…
We give the first comprehensive analysis of the effect of boundary conditions on the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics in the so-called Bethe approximation. Specifically, we show that spectral gap and the log-Sobolev constant of the…
We investigate the mixing rate of a Markov chain where a combination of long distance edges and non-reversibility is introduced: as a first step, we focus here on the following graphs: starting from the cycle graph, we select random nodes…
Considering a Markov chain defined on a cycle, near-quadratic improvement of mixing is shown when only a subtle perturbation is introduced to the structure and non-reversible transition probabilities are used. More precisely, a mixing time…
We introduce an algorithm based on semidefinite programming that yields increasing (resp. decreasing) sequences of lower (resp. upper) bounds on polynomial stationary averages of diffusions with polynomial drift vector and diffusion…
In this paper, we consider the Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach for random sampling of combinatorial objects. The running time of such an algorithm depends on the total mixing time of the underlying Markov chain and is unknown in…
This paper introduces a concept of approximate spectral gap to analyze the mixing time of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for which the usual spectral gap is degenerate or almost degenerate. We use the idea to analyze a class of…
We show that the mixing time of Glauber (single edge update) dynamics for the random cluster model at $q=2$ is bounded by a polynomial in the size of the underlying graph. As a consequence, the Swendsen-Wang algorithm for the ferromagnetic…
The Ising model, originally proposed a century ago, has become a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization in recent decades. However, Ising machines remain constrained by a fundamental hardware-speed trade-off. We introduce the Bounce-Bind…
A $k$-height on a graph $G=(V, E)$ is an assignment $V\to\{0, \ldots, k\}$ such that the value on ajacent vertices differs by at most $1$. We study the Markov chain on $k$-heights that in each step selects a vertex at random, and, if…
Arguing about the equilibrium distribution of continuous-time Markov chains can be vital for showing properties about the underlying systems. For example in biological systems, bistability of a chemical reaction network can hint at its…
For any discrete target distribution, we exploit the connection between Markov chains and Stein's method via the generator approach and express the solution of Stein's equation in terms of expected hitting time. This yields new upper bounds…
We present a novel algorithm to solve a non-linear system of equations, whose solution can be interpreted as a tight lower bound on the vector of expected hitting times of a Markov chain whose transition probabilities are only partially…
In this note, we prove that on any graph of maximal degree $d$ the mixing time of the Glauber Dynamics for the Ising Model at $\beta_c=\tanh^{-1}(\frac1{d-1})$, the uniqueness threshold on the infinite $d$-regular tree, is at most…
In this paper, we propose a low-rank coordinate descent approach to structured semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints. The approach, which we call the Mixing method, is extremely simple to implement, has no free parameters, and…
A joint degree matrix (JDM) specifies the number of connections between nodes of given degrees in a graph, for all degree pairs and uniquely determines the degree sequence of the graph. We consider the space of all balanced realizations of…
We consider the problem of inference in discrete probabilistic models, that is, distributions over subsets of a finite ground set. These encompass a range of well-known models in machine learning, such as determinantal point processes and…
This paper studies Markov chains on the chambers of real hyperplane arrangements, a model that generalizes famous examples, such as the Tsetlin library and riffle shuffles. We discuss cutoff for the Tsetlin library for general weights, and…
We study the problem of learning the structure and parameters of the Ising model, a fundamental model of high-dimensional data, when observing the evolution of an associated Markov chain. A recent line of work has studied the natural…
We prove an optimal $\Omega(n^{-1})$ lower bound on the spectral gap of Glauber dynamics for anti-ferromagnetic two-spin systems with $n$ vertices in the tree uniqueness regime. This spectral gap holds for all, including unbounded, maximum…