cs.LGSep 30, 2026

Near-Linear Accuracy Bounds for Moreau--Yosida Unadjusted Langevin Sampling

Authors: Yuchen Xin, Zhihua Zhang

Organizations: School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University

Abstract

We establish near-linear accuracy bounds for the classical Moreau--Yosida unadjusted Langevin algorithm (MYULA). The target is π∝e−f−gπ\propto e^{-f-g}, where f∈C2(Rd)f\in C^2(\mathbb{R}^d) is mm-strongly convex with Lipschitz gradient and gg is convex and globally Lipschitz. Under an explicit parameter-dependent step-size condition, we bound the invariant-measure bias relative to the Moreau-smoothed target by O~(h)\widetilde O(h), with only logarithmic dependence on the inverse smoothing parameter in the error coefficient. Combining this estimate with the Moreau approximation bias and Wasserstein contraction gives O~(ε−1)\widetilde O(\varepsilon^{-1}) iterations to make the NNth-iterate law μNμ_N satisfy m W2(μN,π)≤ε\sqrt m\,W_2(μ_N,π)\le\varepsilon, for fixed model parameters and initialization. We bound the stationary error directly, without assuming third derivatives or a Lipschitz Hessian. Each iteration uses one gradient evaluation and one exact proximal evaluation. The key idea in our analysis is to convert a second-order stationary residual into a Wasserstein bound using a Poisson-based estimate.

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