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arXiv · 1906.07868

Stochastic Runge-Kutta Accelerates Langevin Monte Carlo and Beyond

Xuechen Li·Denny Wu·Lester Mackey·Murat A. Erdogdu
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Abstract

Sampling with Markov chain Monte Carlo methods often amounts to discretizing some continuous-time dynamics with numerical integration. In this paper, we establish the convergence rate of sampling algorithms obtained by discretizing smooth It\^o diffusions exhibiting fast Wasserstein-$2$ contraction, based on local deviation properties of the integration scheme. In particular, we study a sampling algorithm constructed by discretizing the overdamped Langevin diffusion with the method of stochastic Runge-Kutta. For strongly convex potentials that are smooth up to a certain order, its iterates converge to the target distribution in $2$-Wasserstein distance in $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\epsilon^{-2/3})$ iterations. This improves upon the best-known rate for strongly log-concave sampling based on the overdamped Langevin equation using only the gradient oracle without adjustment. In addition, we extend our analysis of stochastic Runge-Kutta methods to uniformly dissipative diffusions with possibly non-convex potentials and show they achieve better rates compared to the Euler-Maruyama scheme in terms of the dependence on tolerance $\epsilon$. Numerical studies show that these algorithms lead to better stability and lower asymptotic errors.

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Xuechen Li, Denny Wu, Lester Mackey, Murat A. Erdogdu. 2019-06-19. Stochastic Runge-Kutta Accelerates Langevin Monte Carlo and Beyond. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07868

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