Sampling Nonsmooth Log-Concave Densities: A Comparative Study of Primal-Dual Based Proposal Distributions

Juliette Chevallier, Gersende Fort

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Sampling from a distribution on the real d-space, whose density is nonsmooth and log-concave, is a computational issue that often arises in Machine Learning and Statistics. Langevin-based Hastings-Metropolis methods were proposed: they extend the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm by using proximal methods to define a smoothed version of the density of interest. We consider the case when these extensions do not apply: the involved proximal operators do not have closed-form expressions and the density is defined on a subset of the real d-space. We derive new Gaussian proposal mechanisms in a Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm, which use first-order information about the density function. We numerically compare these strategies and discuss the benefits of a change of geometry. The gain in using partial updates of the parameter instead of global updates is also illustrated.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2025 - Proceedings
EditorsBhaskar D Rao, Isabel Trancoso, Gaurav Sharma, Neelesh B. Mehta
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9798350368741
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2025
Externally publishedYes
Event2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2025 - Hyderabad, India
Duration: 6 Apr 202511 Apr 2025

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Conference

Conference2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2025
Country/TerritoryIndia
CityHyderabad
Period6/04/2511/04/25

Keywords

  • Epidemiological model
  • Langevin-based algorithms
  • Monte Carlo Sampling
  • Proximal and Subgradient methods

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