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The Geometry of Efficient Nonconvex Sampling

Vempala, Santosh S., Wibisono, Andre

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present an efficient algorithm for uniformly sampling from an arbitrary compact body $\mathcal{X} \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ from a warm start under isoperimetry and a natural volume growth condition. Our result provides a substantial common generalization of known results for convex bodies and star-shaped bodies. The complexity of the algorithm is polynomial in the dimension, the Poincaré constant of the uniform distribution on $\mathcal{X}$ and the volume growth constant of the set $\mathcal{X}$.






Self-Concordant Perturbations for Linear Bandits

Lévy, Lucas, Valeau, Jean-Lou, Akhavan, Arya, Rebeschini, Patrick

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study the adversarial linear bandits problem and present a unified algorithmic framework that bridges Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) and Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) methods, extending the known connection between them from the full-information setting. Within this framework, we introduce self-concordant perturbations, a family of probability distributions that mirror the role of self-concordant barriers previously employed in the FTRL-based SCRiBLe algorithm. Using this idea, we design a novel FTPL-based algorithm that combines self-concordant regularization with efficient stochastic exploration. Our approach achieves a regret of $O(d\sqrt{n \ln n})$ on both the $d$-dimensional hypercube and the Euclidean ball. On the Euclidean ball, this matches the rate attained by existing self-concordant FTRL methods. For the hypercube, this represents a $\sqrt{d}$ improvement over these methods and matches the optimal bound up to logarithmic factors.