math.STMay 12, 2026

A proximal gradient algorithm for composite log-concave sampling

Authors: Linghai LiuSinho Chewi

Organizations: Yale University

Abstract

We propose an algorithm to sample from composite log-concave distributions over Rd\mathbb{R}^d, i.e., densities of the form πefgπ\propto e^{-f-g}, assuming access to gradient evaluations of ff and a restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO) for gg. The latter requirement means that we can easily sample from the density RGOg,h,y(x)exp(g(x)12hyx2)\text{RGO}_{g,h,y}(x) \propto \exp(-g(x) -\frac{1}{2h}||y-x||^2), which is the sampling analogue of the proximal operator for gg. If f+gf + g is αα-strongly convex and ff is ββ-smooth, our sampler achieves ε\varepsilon error in total variation distance in O~(κdlog4(1/ε))\widetilde{\mathcal O}(κ\sqrt d \log^4(1/\varepsilon)) iterations where κ:=β/ακ:= β/α, which matches prior state-of-the-art results for the case g=0g=0. We further extend our results to cases where (1) ππ is non-log-concave but satisfies a Poincaré or log-Sobolev inequality, and (2) ff is non-smooth but Lipschitz.

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