Smoothed Picard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Abstract:We develop a new low-accuracy sampler, called \emph{smoothed Picard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo}, which combines Gaussian smoothing, Picard iteration, and higher-order discretization. For a log-concave target $\pi \propto \exp(-V)$ in dimension $d$ satisfying $0 \prec \alpha I \preceq \nabla^2 V \preceq \beta I$, with condition number $\kappa := \beta/\alpha$, smoothed Picard HMC returns a sample with $\sqrt \alpha\,W_2(\cdot,\pi) \le \varepsilon$ using $\widetilde O(\kappa^2 + \kappa^{7/6} d^{1/6}/\varepsilon^{1/3})$ gradient queries. We also prove stronger $W_q$ bounds, and then develop an algorithmic framework, the recursive warm start generator, to upgrade these $W_q$ bounds to stronger divergence guarantees. This produces a warm start for the proximal bouncy particle sampler, introduced in a companion work, leading to a high-accuracy log-concave sampler with complexity $\widetilde O((\kappa^{7/6} d^{1/6} + \kappa^{1/2} d^{1/4})\mathrm{polylog}(1/\varepsilon))$.

Statistics Theory (math.ST); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Numerical Analysis (math.NA)

arXiv:2609.06906 [math.ST]

(or arXiv:2609.06906v1 [math.ST] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.06906 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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