text: We study Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) for sampling from a strongly logconcave density proportional to @math where @math is @math -strongly convex and @math -smooth (the condition number is @math ). We show that the relaxation time (inverse of the spectral gap) of ideal HMC is @math , improving on the previous best bound of @math ; we complement this with an example where the relaxation time is @math . When implemented using a nearly optimal ODE solver, HMC returns an @math -approximate point in @math -Wasserstein distance using @math gradient evaluations per step and @math total time.
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  @cite_11: The Jacobi metric introduced in mathematical physics can be used to analyze Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). In a geometrical setting, each step of HMC corresponds to a geodesic on a Riemannian manifold with a Jacobi metric. Our calculation of the sectional curvature of this HMC manifold allows us to see that it is positive in cases such as sampling from a high dimensional multivariate Gaussian. We show that positive curvature can be used to prove theoretical concentration results for HMC Markov chains.
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  @cite_8: We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective function. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin algorithm perform accelerated gradient descent in this metric. To characterize the convergence of the algorithm, we construct a Lyapunov functional and exploit hypocoercivity of the underdamped Langevin algorithm. As an application, we show that accelerated rates can be obtained for a class of nonconvex functions with the Langevin algorithm.
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  @cite_1: We give the first rigorous proof of the convergence of Riemannian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, a general (and practical) method for sampling Gibbs distributions. Our analysis shows that the rate of convergence is bounded in terms of natural smoothness parameters of an associated Riemannian manifold. We then apply the method with the manifold defined by the log barrier function to the problems of (1) uniformly sampling a polytope and (2) computing its volume, the latter by extending Gaussian cooling to the manifold setting. In both cases, the total number of steps needed is O^ * (mn^ 2 3 ), improving the state of the art. A key ingredient of our analysis is a proof of an analog of the KLS conjecture for Gibbs distributions over manifolds.
  @cite_6: We study the underdamped Langevin diffusion when the log of the target distribution is smooth and strongly concave. We present a MCMC algorithm based on its discretization and show that it achieves @math error (in 2-Wasserstein distance) in @math steps. This is a significant improvement over the best known rate for overdamped Langevin MCMC, which is @math steps under the same smoothness concavity assumptions. The underdamped Langevin MCMC scheme can be viewed as a version of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) which has been observed to outperform overdamped Langevin MCMC methods in a number of application areas. We provide quantitative rates that support this empirical wisdom.
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  @cite_2: We obtain several quantitative bounds on the mixing properties of the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm for a strongly log-concave target distribution @math on @math , showing that HMC mixes quickly in this setting. One of our main results is a dimension-free bound on the mixing of an "ideal" HMC chain, which is used to show that the usual leapfrog implementation of HMC can sample from @math using only @math gradient evaluations. This dependence on dimension is sharp, and our results significantly extend and improve previous quantitative bounds on the mixing of HMC.
  @cite_15: Sampling logconcave functions arising in statistics and machine learning has been a subject of intensive study. Recent developments include analyses for Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). While both approaches have dimension-independent bounds for the underlying @math processes under sufficiently strong smoothness conditions, the resulting discrete algorithms have complexity and number of function evaluations growing with the dimension. Motivated by this problem, in this paper, we give a general algorithm for solving multivariate ordinary differential equations whose solution is close to the span of a known basis of functions (e.g., polynomials or piecewise polynomials). The resulting algorithm has polylogarithmic depth and essentially tight runtime - it is nearly linear in the size of the representation of the solution. We apply this to the sampling problem to obtain a nearly linear implementation of HMC for a broad class of smooth, strongly logconcave densities, with the number of iterations (parallel depth) and gradient evaluations being @math in the dimension (rather than polynomial as in previous work). This class includes the widely-used loss function for logistic regression with incoherent weight matrices and has been subject of much study recently. We also give a faster algorithm with @math for the more general and standard class of strongly convex functions with Lipschitz gradient. These results are based on (1) an improved contraction bound for the exact HMC process and (2) logarithmic bounds on the degree of polynomials that approximate solutions of the differential equations arising in implementing HMC.
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  @cite_12: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a widely deployed method to sample from high-dimensional distributions in Statistics and Machine learning. HMC is known to run very efficiently in practice and its popular second-order "leapfrog" implementation has long been conjectured to run in @math gradient evaluations. Here we show that this conjecture is true when sampling from strongly log-concave target distributions that satisfy a weak third-order regularity property associated with the input data. Our regularity condition is weaker than the Lipschitz Hessian property and allows us to show faster convergence bounds for a much larger class of distributions than would be possible with the usual Lipschitz Hessian constant alone. Important distributions that satisfy our regularity condition include posterior distributions used in Bayesian logistic regression for which the data satisfies an "incoherence" property. Our result compares favorably with the best available bounds for the class of strongly log-concave distributions, which grow like @math gradient evaluations with the dimension. Moreover, our simulations on synthetic data suggest that, when our regularity condition is satisfied, leapfrog HMC performs better than its competitors -- both in terms of accuracy and in terms of the number of gradient evaluations it requires.
  @cite_20: Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows SGLD to escape local minima and suffices to guarantee asymptotic convergence to global minimizers for sufficiently regular non-convex objectives (Gelfand and Mitter, 1991). The present work provides a nonasymptotic analysis in the context of non-convex learning problems, giving finite-time guarantees for SGLD to find approximate minimizers of both empirical and population risks. As in the asymptotic setting, our analysis relates the discrete-time SGLD Markov chain to a continuous-time diffusion process. A new tool that drives the results is the use of weighted transportation cost inequalities to quantify the rate of convergence of SGLD to a stationary distribution in the Euclidean @math -Wasserstein distance.
  @cite_17: We study sampling as optimization in the space of measures. We focus on gradient flow-based optimization with the Langevin dynamics as a case study. We investigate the source of the bias of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) in discrete time, and consider how to remove or reduce the bias. We point out the difficulty is that the heat flow is exactly solvable, but neither its forward nor backward method is implementable in general, except for Gaussian data. We propose the symmetrized Langevin algorithm (SLA), which should have a smaller bias than ULA, at the price of implementing a proximal gradient step in space. We show SLA is in fact consistent for Gaussian target measure, whereas ULA is not. We also illustrate various algorithms explicitly for Gaussian target measure, including gradient descent, proximal gradient, and Forward-Backward, and show they are all consistent.
summary: Various versions of Langevin dynamics have been studied in many recent papers, see @cite_15 @cite_14 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_19 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_7 @cite_13 @cite_17 @cite_9 @cite_8 . The convergence rate of HMC is also studied recently in @cite_18 @cite_1 @cite_2 @cite_0 @cite_12 @cite_11 . The first bound for our setting was obtained by Mangoubi and Smith @cite_2 , who gave an @math bound on the convergence rate of ideal HMC.