langevin algorithm
Theoretical guidelines for annealed Langevin dynamics in compositional simulation-based inference
Touron, Camille, Cardoso, Gabriel V., Arbel, Julyan, Rodrigues, Pedro L. C.
Compositional score-based approaches to simulation-based inference (SBI) approximate the posterior over a shared parameter given $n$ independent observations by aggregating individually learned posterior scores: currently, there are two main propositions of such methods (Geffner et al. (2023), Linhart et al. (2026)). As the resulting composite score does not correspond to the score of any distribution along the forward diffusion path of the true multi-observation posterior, sampling from it via a reverse SDE leads to an irreducible bias. Annealed Langevin dynamics provides a principled alternative: it treats the composite score as the genuine score of a sequence of tractable bridging densities and samples from them in succession. When properly tuned, it could lead to a controllable bias. However, its hyperparameters, namely step sizes, the number of steps per level, and the number of annealing levels, have so far been chosen empirically. We derive Wasserstein bounds for annealed Langevin with approximate scores and translate them into explicit decision rules for these hyperparameters that guarantee a prescribed sampling accuracy, while highlighting different theoretical aspects of each composite score formulation. In the Gaussian setting, we obtain closed-form expressions for all relevant quantities and prove that the bridging densities of Linhart et al. (2026) consistently admit larger step sizes and require fewer total Langevin steps than those of Geffner et al. (2023). Furthermore, we show empirically that the tuning obtained in the Gaussian setting generalizes to more complex problems, thus providing a well-understood and theoretically grounded starting point for practitioners using compositional score-based approaches.
Decentralized Proximal Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics
Islam, Mohammad Rafiqul, Zhu, Lingjiong
Decentralized learning is a learning process in which data is distributed across computational agents or collected by individual agents, and model parameters are computed as the consensus of the agents. It has gained a lot of interest for applications where agents can collaboratively learn a predictive model without sharing their own data, but sharing only their local models with their immediate neighbors to generate a global model [He et al., 2018, Hendrikx et al., 2019, Arjevani et al., 2020]. We assume there are N agents who are connected over an undirected communication network G = (V,E) where V = {1,...,N} represents the agents and E V V denotes the set of edges; i.e., if agent i and j are connected then (i,j) E implies (j,i) E. Suppose we have a collection of n independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data pairs zi = (ai,yi), where ai Rp is the feature vector and yi the label or response of the i-th observation. Let Z = [z1,z2,,zn] Rnp be sampled from the distribution p(Z|x) where the parameter x Rd has a common prior. The goal is to sample from the posterior distribution p(x|Z) p(Z|x)p(x) by distributing Z among N agents such that Zi = {zi1,zi2,,zini} is the subset of data exclusive to agent i.
Efficientconstrainedsamplingviathe mirror-Langevinalgorithm
The sampling problem has attracted considerable attention recently within the machine learning and statistics communities. This renewed interest in sampling is spurred, on one hand, by a wide breadth of applications ranging from Bayesian inference [RC04, DM+19] and its use in inverse problems [DS17], to neural networks [GPAM+14, TR20].