On Mixing Times of Metropolized Algorithm With Optimization Step (MAO) : A New Framework

Fast mixing of Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo: Benefits of multi-step gradients

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm for drawing samples from smooth probability densities over continuous spaces. We study the variant most widely used in practice, Metropolized HMC with the Störmer-Verlet or leapfrog integrator, and make two primary contributions. First, we provide a non-asymptotic upper bound on the mixing time of the Metropolized HMC with explicit choices of step-size and number of leapfrog steps. This bound gives a precise quantification of the faster convergence of Metropolized HMC relative to simpler MCMC algori…

Logsmooth Gradient Concentration and Tighter Runtimes for Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

We show that the gradient norm $\|\nabla f(x)\|$ for $x \sim \exp(-f(x))$, where $f$ is strongly convex and smooth, concentrates tightly around its mean. This removes a barrier in the prior state-of-the-art analysis for the well-studied Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm for sampling from a strongly logconcave distribution. We correspondingly demonstrate that Metropolized HMC mixes in $\tilde{O}(κd)$ iterations, improving upon the $\tilde{O}(κ^{1.5}\sqrt{d} + κd)$ runtime of (Dwivedi et. al. '18, Chen et. al. '19) by a factor $(κ/d)^{1/2}$ when the condition number $κ$ is lar…

当Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo何时能证明性地优于Metropolis调整的 Langevin 算法？

When does Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo provably outperform Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm?

研究通过分析HMC算法的混合时间，证明其在特定条件下优于MALA算法，无需log-concavity假设，仅依赖等周不等式。

Lower Bounds on Metropolized Sampling Methods for Well-Conditioned Distributions

We give lower bounds on the performance of two of the most popular sampling methods in practice, the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) and multi-step Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with a leapfrog integrator, when applied to well-conditioned distributions. Our main result is a nearly-tight lower bound of $\widetildeΩ(κd)$ on the mixing time of MALA from an exponentially warm start, matching a line of algorithmic results up to logarithmic factors and answering an open question of Chewi et. al. We also show that a polynomial dependence on dimension is necessary for the relaxation time…

Log-concave sampling: Metropolis-Hastings algorithms are fast

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 simulating a Markov chain obtained from the discretization of an appropriate Langevin diffusion, combined with an accept-reject step. Relative to known guarantees for the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA), our bounds show that the use of an accept-reject step in MALA leads to an exponentially improved dependence on the error-tolerance. Concretely, in order to obtai…