English

SunBURST: Deterministic GPU-Accelerated Bayesian Evidence via Mode-Centric Laplace Integration

Computation 2026-03-03 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

Bayesian evidence evaluation becomes computationally prohibitive in high dimensions due to the curse of dimensionality and the sequential nature of sampling-based methods. We introduce SunBURST, a deterministic GPU-native algorithm for Bayesian evidence calculation that replaces global volume exploration with mode-centric geometric integration. The pipeline combines radial mode discovery, batched L-BFGS refinement, and Laplace-based analytic integration, treating modes independently and converting large batches of likelihood evaluations into massively parallel GPU workloads. For Gaussian and near-Gaussian posteriors, where the Laplace approximation is exact or highly accurate, SunBURST achieves numerical agreement at double-precision tolerance in dimensions up to 1024 in our benchmarks, with sub-linear wall-clock scaling across the tested range. In multimodal Gaussian mixtures, conservative configurations yield sub-percent accuracy while maintaining favorable scaling. SunBURST is not intended as a universal replacement for sampling-based inference. Its design targets regimes common in physical parameter estimation and inverse problems, where posterior mass is locally well approximated by Gaussian structure around a finite number of modes. In strongly non-Gaussian settings, the method can serve as a fast geometry-aware evidence estimator or as a preprocessing stage for hybrid workflows. These results show that high-precision Bayesian evidence evaluation can be made computationally tractable in very high dimensions through deterministic integration combined with massive parallelism.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.19957,
  title  = {SunBURST: Deterministic GPU-Accelerated Bayesian Evidence via Mode-Centric Laplace Integration},
  author = {Ira Wolfson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19957},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

46 pages, 1 figure, 10 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:22:48.878Z