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Fast Non-Log-Concave Sampling under Nonconvex Equality and Inequality Constraints with Landing
Sampling from constrained statistical distributions is a fundamental task in various fields including Bayesian statistics, computational chemistry, and statistical physics. This article considers sampling from a constrained distribution that is described by an unconstrained density, as well as additional equality and/or inequality constraints, which often make the constraint set nonconvex. Existing methods struggle in the presence of such nonconvex constraints, as they rely on projections, which are computationally expensive or intractable, are specialized to either inequality or equality constraints, and often lack rigorous quantitative convergence guarantees. In this paper, we introduce Overdamped Langevin with LAnding (OLLA), a new framework that can design overdamped Langevin dynamics accommodating both nonlinear equality and inequality constraints. The proposed dynamics also deterministically corrects trajectories along the normal direction of the constraint surface, thus obviating the need for explicit projections. We show that, under suitable regularity conditions on the target density and the feasible set ฮฃ Rd, OLLA converges exponentially fast in 2-Wasserstein distance to the constrained target density ฯฮฃ(x) exp( f(x))dฯฮฃ. Lastly, through experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency of OLLA compared to known constrained Langevin algorithms and their slack variable variants, highlighting its favorable computational cost and fast empirical mixing.1
Stepsize Anything: AUnified Learning Rate Schedule for Budgeted-Iteration Training
The expanding computational costs and limited resources underscore the critical need for budgeted-iteration training, which aims to achieve optimal learning within predetermined iteration budgets. While learning rate schedules fundamentally govern the performance of different networks and tasks, particularly in budgeted-iteration scenarios, their design remains largely heuristic, lacking theoretical foundations. In addition, the optimal learning rate schedule requires extensive trial-and-error selection, making the training process inefficient. In this work, we propose the Unified Budget-Aware (UBA) schedule, a theoretically grounded learning rate schedule that consistently outperforms commonly-used schedules among diverse architectures and tasks under different constrained training budgets. First, we bridge the gap by constructing a novel training budget-aware optimization framework, which explicitly accounts for the robustness to landscape curvature variations.
Fast Rank-1 Lattice Targeted Sampling for Black-box Optimization Anonymous Author(s) Affiliation Address email
Black-box optimization has gained great attention for its success in recent ap-1 plications. However, scaling up to high-dimensional problems with good query2 efficiency remains challenging. This paper proposes a novel Rank-1 Lattice Tar-3 geted Sampling (RLTS) technique to address this issue. Our RLTS benefits from4 random rank-1 lattice Quasi-Monte Carlo, which enables us to perform fast local5 exact Gaussian processes (GP) training and inference with O(nlogn)complexity6 w.r.t.
Pessimistic Risk-Aware Policy Learning in Contextual Bandits
Wan, Yilong, Li, Yuqiang, Wu, Xianyi
We study risk-aware offline policy learning, aiming to learn a decision rule from logged data that is optimal under general risk criteria. This problem is crucial in high-stakes domains where online interaction is infeasible and adverse outcomes must be carefully controlled. However, existing literature on offline contextual bandits either centers on expected-reward criteria or restricts risk considerations to policy evaluation instead of optimization. In this work, we propose a unified distributional framework for optimizing Lipschitz-continuous risk functionals, a broad class of risk measures encompassing mean-variance, entropic risk, and conditional value-at-risk, among others. By developing novel empirical concentration inequalities for importance sampling-based distributional estimators, our analysis derives data-dependent suboptimality bounds with an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{n})$ rate, without relying on restrictive uniform overlap assumptions. This rate is minimax optimal and matches that of risk-neutral offline policy optimization, indicating that optimizing general Lipschitz risk criteria incurs no additional statistical cost relative to the expected-reward.
Fast Rank-1 Lattice Targeted Sampling for Black-box Optimization
Black-box optimization has gained great attention for its success in recent applications. However, scaling up to high-dimensional problems with good query efficiency remains challenging. This paper proposes a novel Rank-1 Lattice Targeted Sampling (RLTS) technique to address this issue. Our RLTS benefits from random rank-1 lattice Quasi-Monte Carlo, which enables us to perform fast local exact Gaussian processes (GP) training and inference with O(nlogn)complexity w.r.t.