Latest papers 56

11 papers in the last four weeks, up 120% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

May 29, 2026

Large-scale Uncertainty Quantification for Latent Variable Models Using Subsampling Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics combined with Gibbs updates (SGLD--Gibbs) provides a highly scalable approach to approximate Bayesian inference in latent variable models. However, it remains unclear how to tune the algorithm's hyperparameters in a principled manner to ensure the uncertainty estimates are statistically meaningful. In this work, we address this gap in tuning guidance by developing a statistical scaling limit theory for SGLD--Gibbs. We derive a joint asymptotic limit for the global parameters and latent variables under appropriate space-time rescaling. We show that global parameters converge to a diffusion-type limit, while each latent variable converges to a jump process, reflecting the use of intermittent Gibbs updates. This joint jump-diffusion structure reveals how latent-variable randomness contributes to the stationary distribution of the global parameters. We leverage our results to propose explicit guidance on hyperparameter tuning for SGLD--Gibbs that ensures meaningful uncertainty quantification. Numerical experiments show that SGLD--Gibbs with our tuning guidance leads to better parameter estimates, uncertainty quantification, and predictive performance than stochastic variational inference.
May 29, 2026

Accurate Large-sample Uncertainty Quantification using Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Tuning algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for approximate sampling and uncertainty quantification remains challenging, particularly in the practically relevant settings when the batch size is large or the model is misspecified. Existing theory that provides tuning guidance relies on continuous-time limits or strong statistical assumptions, which can become quantitatively inaccurate in these regimes. We address these shortcomings by proposing new discrete-time approximations to SG(L)D with and without momentum, which enables accurate predictions of the stationary covariance, iterate average covariance, and integrated autocorrelation time. Moreover, we prove quantitative, non-asymptotic error bounds showing that these estimates are sufficiently accurate for practical tuning and uncertainty quantification. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our theory yields improved tuning guidance across a range of models and data-generating distributions where existing approaches fail, including when using the ββ-divergence rather than log-loss to obtain statistically robust inferences.
May 29, 2026

Improved Guarantees for Langevin Monte Carlo with Average Smoothness

We establish improved nonasymptotic bounds for Langevin Monte Carlo in the strongly log-concave setting, when the error is measured by the Wasserstein distance. The main result shows that the discretization error is governed by an average coordinate-wise smoothness constant, rather than by the usual global smoothness constant. The proof is short and probabilistic, and relies on a refined use of the synchronous coupling. We further show that the same ideas lead to improved bounds for variable step sizes, for potentials whose Laplacian is Lipschitz-continuous, and for finite-sum problems sampled by stochastic-gradient Langevin dynamics with fixed point control variates. In the Laplacian-smooth case, the usual Hessian-Lipschitz contribution is replaced by a weaker trace-type third-order smoothness quantity. In the finite-sum setting, the resulting SGLD bound improves the dependence on the root mean square smoothness of the component functions. Applications to generalized linear models with Gaussian design show that these refinements can yield substantial, dimension-dependent improvements over previously known bounds, especially for correlated covariates.
May 27, 2026

Thinned Mean Field Langevin Dynamics

Several important learning tasks can be formulated as minimizing an entropy-regularized objective over an appropriate space of probability distributions. Mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) facilitate computation in this general context, casting the minimizer as the invariant distribution of a McKean--Vlasov process, which can be numerically discretized using NN particles and thus simulated. However, simulating this interacting particle system has computational complexity of order N2N^2. Motivated by recent research into kernel thinning, we propose KT-MFLD, in which each particle interacts only with a thinned particle coreset of size O(N12)\mathcal{O}(N^{\frac{1}{2}}). KT-MFLD thus reduces the computational complexity to order N32N^{\frac{3}{2}} while, under mild regularity conditions, achieving the same convergence guarantees (up to logarithmic factors) as MFLD. Our theoretical analysis is empirically confirmed on tasks including the training of student-teacher neural networks, quantization with maximum mean discrepancy, and computation of predictively-oriented posteriors in a post-Bayesian framework.
May 22, 2026

On the Stability of Spherical Hellinger-Kantorovich Flows and Their Implications for Differential Privacy

Gradient-flow sampling interprets a Gibbs distribution as the minimizer of an energy functional over probability measures and generates dynamics converging to this target. Under spherical Hellinger-Kantorovich (SHK) geometry, the flow couples transport and reaction and coincides with birth-death Langevin dynamics. In this work, we develop a perturbation theory for SHK gradient flows. For two potentials VV and V′V^{\prime}, we compare the associated flows from a common initialization and quantify how potential discrepancies propagate over time. A uniform perturbation bound yields dimension-free, pointwise control of the log-likelihood ratio and Rényi divergence, while additional structure allows us to derive bounds for the KL divergence as well. We apply these results to approximate sampling for the exponential mechanism in differential privacy. The likelihood-ratio control provides explicit time-dependent Pure-DP guarantees for SHK-based samplers, while the KL bound yields Approximate-DP certificates via hockey-stick divergence. We also derive a utility bound separating intrinsic exponential-mechanism suboptimality from finite-time sampling error.
May 20, 2026

Theoretical guidelines for annealed Langevin dynamics in compositional simulation-based inference

Compositional score-based approaches to simulation-based inference (SBI) approximate the posterior over a shared parameter given nn 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.
May 18, 2026

Reducing Diffusion Model Memorization with Higher Order Langevin Dynamics

Diffusion/score-based models have emerged as powerful generative models, capable of generating high-quality samples that mimic the training data distribution. However, it has been observed that they are prone to reproducing training samples-known as "memorization"-potentially violating copyright and privacy. In this paper, we study the effect of Higher-Order Langevin Dynamics (HOLD) on this phenomenon. HOLD diffusion processes introduce auxiliary variables; if the data variable is interpreted as "position," then the auxiliary variables can be interpreted as "velocity" and "acceleration," depending on the chosen order of the model. They were originally proposed based on the intuition that they regularize the trajectories of the data variable by implicitly imposing additional dynamical constraints. Our work provides, to our knowledge, the first theoretical characterization of the regularization effect of HOLD. Specifically, we show that in HOLD, the dynamics of the data variable are governed by a low-pass-filtered version of the learned score function, with smoothness increasing with the order of HOLD. We then analyze the optimal empirical score and the possibility of distribution collapse. Together, our results explain the mitigation of memorization as the model order increases. Finally, we present an empirical study on real-world data that supports our theory and highlights this distinct advantage of HOLD over standard diffusion in practice.
May 15, 2026

Dimension-Uniform Discretization Analysis of Preconditioned Annealed Langevin Dynamics for Multimodal Gaussian Mixtures

Obtaining stable diffusion-based samplers in high- and infinite-dimensional settings is challenging because errors can accumulate across high-frequency coordinates and make the dynamics unstable under refinement of the finite-dimensional approximation of the underlying function-space problem. Discretization is a typical source of such errors, and preconditioning with a suitable spectral decay is one way to control their accumulation. In this paper, we study this problem for preconditioned annealed Langevin dynamics (ALD) applied to Gaussian mixtures. We first show that Euler-Maruyama (EM) discretization, by treating the stiff linear part of the annealed score with a forward Euler step, imposes a stability constraint coupling the preconditioner with the annealed covariance scale. Together with the conditions ensuring dimension-uniform control of the annealed dynamics, this constraint forces the initial smoothed law to remain uniformly close to the target across dimensions. We then consider an exponential-integrator scheme that integrates the stiff linear part of the annealed score exactly. Under explicit spectral summability conditions coupling the smoothing covariance, the component covariance spectra, and the preconditioner, we prove a dimension-uniform Kullback-Leibler (KL) bound for this scheme. This bound can be made arbitrarily small, uniformly in dimension, by allowing enough time for annealing and then refining the time mesh accordingly. Importantly, these conditions allow regimes in which the KL divergence between the target and the initial smoothed law diverges with dimension, showing that the restrictions imposed by EM are scheme-dependent rather than intrinsic to ALD.
May 14, 2026

Training-Free Generative Sampling via Moment-Matched Score Smoothing

Diffusion models generate samples by denoising along the score of a perturbed target distribution. In practice, one trains a neural diffusion model, which is computationally expensive. Recent work suggests that score matching implicitly smooths the empirical score, and that this smoothing bias promotes generalization by capturing low-dimensional data geometry. We propose moment-matched score-smoothed overdamped Langevin dynamics (MM-SOLD), a training-free interacting particle sampler that enforces the target moments throughout the sampling trajectory. We prove that, in the large-particle limit, the empirical particle density converges to a deterministic limit whose one-particle stationary marginal is a Gibbs--Boltzmann density obtained by exponentially tilting a naive score-smoothed diffusion target. The mean and covariance of this distribution agree with the empirical moments of the training data. Experiments on 2D distributions and latent-space image generation show that MM-SOLD enables fast, robust, training-free sampling on CPUs, with sample fidelity and diversity competitive with neural diffusion baselines.
May 8, 2026

Slowly Annealed Langevin Dynamics: Theory and Applications to Training-Free Guided Generation

We study Slowly Annealed Langevin Dynamics (SALD), a sampler for tracking a path of moving target distributions and approximating the terminal target through time slowdown. We establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees via a KL differential inequality, showing that slowdown improves tracking through contraction of intermediate targets and the complexity of the path. Motivated by training-free guided generation with pretrained score-based generative models, we further introduce Velocity-Aware SALD (VA-SALD), which explicitly incorporates the underlying marginal distributions of the pretrained model and uses slowdown to correct the additional deviation induced by guidance. This yields a principled framework for training-free guided generation for diffusion-based and related generative model families, together with convergence guarantees that clarify the roles of intermediate functional inequalities and guidance bias. Code is available at https://github.com/anitan0925/sald.
May 7, 2026

Conservative Flows: A New Paradigm of Generative Models

Modern generative modeling is dominated by transport from a noise prior to data. We propose an alternative paradigm in which generation is performed by a discrete stochastic dynamics that leaves the data distribution invariant, initialized from data-supported states rather than from noise. The framework can utilize any pretrained flow model. We develop two probability-preserving sampling mechanisms, a corrected Langevin dynamics with a Metropolis adjustment and a predictor-corrector flow, that operate directly on existing checkpoints. We validate the framework on a synthetic Swiss-roll target, ImageNet-256 and Oxford Flowers-102, where our samplers consistently improve over the original generation procedures.
May 7, 2026

Time-Inhomogeneous Preconditioned Langevin Dynamics

Langevin sampling from distributions of the form p(x)∝exp⁡(−Ψ(x))p(x) \propto \exp(-Ψ(x)) faces two major challenges: (global) mode coverage and (local) mode exploration. The first challenge is particularly relevant for multi-modal distributions with disjoint modes, whereas the second arises when the potential ΨΨ exhibits diverse and ill-conditioned local mode geometry. To address these challenges, a common approach is to precondition Langevin dynamics with problem-specific information, such as the sample covariance or the local curvature of ΨΨ. However, existing preconditioner choices inherently involve a trade-off between global mode coverage and local mode exploration, and no prior method resolves both simultaneously. To overcome this limitation, we propose the TIPreL, which introduces a time- and position-dependent preconditioner. This design effectively addresses both challenges mentioned above within a single framework. We establish convergence of the resulting dynamics in the Wasserstein-2 distance both in continuous time and for a tamed Euler discretization. In particular, our analysis extends the existing state of the art by proving convergence under time- and space-dependent diffusion coefficients, and only locally Lipschitz drifts, which has not been covered by prior work. Finally, we experimentally compare TIPreL with competing preconditioning schemes on a two-dimensional, severely ill-posed example and on a Bayesian logistic regression task in higher dimensions, confirming the efficiency of the proposed method.
May 6, 2026

Conditional Diffusion Under Linear Constraints: Langevin Mixing and Information-Theoretic Guarantees

We study zero-shot conditional sampling with pretrained diffusion models for linear inverse problems, including inpainting and super-resolution. In these problems, the observation determines only part of the unknown signal. The remaining degrees of freedom must be sampled according to the correct conditional data distribution. Existing projection-based samplers enforce measurement consistency by correcting the observed component during reverse diffusion. However, measurement consistency alone does not determine how probability mass should be distributed along the feasible set, and this can lead to biased conditional samples. We analyze this issue through a normal--tangent decomposition of the score function. For Gaussian noising, the observed-direction score is exactly determined by the measurement; only the tangent conditional score is unknown. We prove that the error from replacing this score by the unconditional tangent score is upper bounded by a dimension-free conditional mutual information between observed and unobserved components. This gives an information-theoretic decomposition into initialization and pathwise score-mismatch errors. Motivated by the theory, we propose a projected-Langevin initialization followed by guided reverse denoising, which outperforms a strong projection-based baseline in inpainting and super-resolution experiments.
May 1, 2026

Decentralized Proximal Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics

We propose Decentralized Proximal Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (DE-PSGLD), a decentralized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for sampling from a log-concave probability distribution constrained to a convex domain. Constraints are enforced through a shared proximal regularization based on the Moreau-Yosida envelope, enabling unconstrained updates while preserving consistency with the target constrained posterior. We establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees in the 2-Wasserstein distance for both individual agent iterates and their network averages. Our analysis shows that DE-PSGLD converges to a regularized Gibbs distribution and quantifies the bias introduced by the proximal approximation. We evaluate DE-PSGLD for different sampling problems on synthetic and real datasets. As the first decentralized approach for constrained domains, our algorithm exhibits fast posterior concentration and high predictive accuracy.
Apr 27, 2026

Conditional Score-Based Modeling of Effective Langevin Dynamics

Stochastic reduced-order models are widely used to represent the effective dynamics of complex systems, but estimating their drift and diffusion coefficients from data remains challenging. Standard approaches often rely on short-time trajectory increments, state-space partitioning, or repeated simulation of candidate models, which become unreliable or computationally expensive for high-dimensional systems, coarse temporal sampling, or unevenly sampled data. We introduce a data-driven calibration method based on a novel relationship between the coefficients of a stochastic reduced model and the conditional score of the finite-time transition density, defined as the gradient of the logarithm of the transition density with respect to the initial state. The resulting identity expresses derivatives of lagged correlation functions as stationary expectations over observed lagged pairs involving this conditional score and the unknown model coefficients. This formulation allows the drift and diffusion structure to be constrained directly from finite-lag statistics, without differentiating trajectories, partitioning state space, or repeatedly integrating candidate reduced models during calibration, yielding a least-squares fitting problem over stationary lagged pairs. We validate the approach on three systems of increasing complexity: an analytically tractable Cox--Ingersoll--Ross diffusion, a two-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusion with affine multiplicative noise, and a periodic soft-spin stochastic Landau--Lifshitz chain. Across these tests, the inferred models preserve the invariant statistics while reproducing finite-lag dynamical correlations. The framework provides a scalable route for learning stochastic reduced-order models from data that reproduce prescribed statistical and dynamical properties.
Apr 20, 2026

Efficient Diffusion Models under Nonconvex Equality and Inequality constraints via Landing

Generative modeling within constrained sets is essential for scientific and engineering applications involving physical, geometric, or safety requirements (e.g., molecular generation, robotics). We present a unified framework for constrained diffusion models on generic nonconvex feasible sets ΣΣ that simultaneously enforces equality and inequality constraints throughout the diffusion process. Our framework incorporates both overdamped and underdamped dynamics for forward and backward sampling. A key algorithmic innovation is a computationally efficient landing mechanism that replaces costly and often ill-defined projections onto ΣΣ, ensuring feasibility without iterative Newton solves or projection failures. By leveraging underdamped dynamics, we accelerate mixing toward the prior distribution, effectively alleviating the high simulation costs typically associated with constrained diffusion. Empirically, this approach reduces function evaluations and memory usage during both training and inference while preserving sample quality. On benchmarks featuring equality and mixed constraints, our method achieves comparable sample quality to state-of-the-art baselines while significantly reducing computational cost, providing a practical and scalable solution for diffusion on nonconvex feasible sets.
Apr 2, 2026

Bias mitigation in graph diffusion models

Most existing graph diffusion models have significant bias problems. We observe that the forward diffusion's maximum perturbation distribution in most models deviates from the standard Gaussian distribution, while reverse sampling consistently starts from a standard Gaussian distribution, which results in a reverse-starting bias. Together with the inherent exposure bias of diffusion models, this results in degraded generation quality. This paper proposes a comprehensive approach to mitigate both biases. To mitigate reverse-starting bias, we employ a newly designed Langevin sampling algorithm to align with the forward maximum perturbation distribution, establishing a new reverse-starting point. To address the exposure bias, we introduce a score correction mechanism based on a newly defined score difference. Our approach, which requires no network modifications, is validated across multiple models, datasets, and tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results.Code is at https://github.com/kunzhan/spp
Mar 27, 2026

Generative Shape Reconstruction with Geometry-Guided Langevin Dynamics

Reconstructing complete 3D shapes from incomplete or noisy observations is a fundamentally ill-posed problem that requires balancing measurement consistency with shape plausibility. Existing methods for shape reconstruction can achieve strong geometric fidelity in ideal conditions but fail under realistic conditions with incomplete measurements or noise. At the same time, recent generative models for 3D shapes can synthesize highly realistic and detailed shapes but fail to be consistent with observed measurements. In this work, we introduce GG-Langevin: Geometry-Guided Langevin dynamics, a probabilistic approach that unifies these complementary perspectives. By traversing the trajectories of Langevin dynamics induced by a diffusion model, while preserving measurement consistency at every step, we generatively reconstruct shapes that fit both the measurements and the data-informed prior. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that GG-Langevin achieves higher geometric accuracy and greater robustness to missing data than existing methods for surface reconstruction.
Mar 11, 2026

On the Robustness of Langevin Dynamics to Score Function Error

We consider the robustness of score-based generative modeling to errors in the estimate of the score function. In particular, we show that Langevin dynamics is not robust to the L2L^2 errors (more generally LpL^p errors) in the estimate of the score function. It is well-established that with small L2L^2 errors in the estimate of the score function, diffusion models can sample faithfully from the target distribution under fairly mild regularity assumptions in a polynomial time horizon. In contrast, our work shows that even for simple distributions in high dimensions, Langevin dynamics run for any polynomial time horizon will produce a distribution far from the target distribution in Total Variation (TV) distance, even when the L2L^2 error (more generally LpL^p) of the estimate of the score function is arbitrarily small. Considering such an error in the estimate of the score function is unavoidable in practice when learning the score function from data, our results provide further justification for diffusion models over Langevin dynamics and serve to caution against the use of Langevin dynamics with estimated scores.
Mar 6, 2026

Stochastic Attention via Langevin Dynamics on the Modern Hopfield Energy

Attention heads retrieve: given a query, they return a weighted average of stored values. We showed that this computation is one step of gradient descent on the modern Hopfield energy, and that Langevin sampling from the corresponding Boltzmann distribution yielded stochastic attention, a training-free sampler controlled by a single temperature parameter. Lowering the temperature gave exact retrieval; raising it gave open-ended generation. Because the energy gradient equals the attention map, no score network, training loop, or learned model was required, making the approach particularly suited to the low-data regime where learned generative models are starved of training signal. We derived an entropy inflection condition that identified the retrieval-to-generation transition temperature for any memory geometry and validated the sampler on five domains spanning two orders of magnitude in dimension. A single Boolean mask on the attention softmax, identical to the causal mask used in transformers but applied along the memory axis rather than the sequence axis, turned the sampler into a zero-shot class-conditional generator on Olivetti faces with no retraining and no learned classifier. On MNIST digit images, stochastic attention produced samples that were markedly more novel and more diverse than the best learned baseline while matching a Metropolis-corrected gold standard. On protein sequences from a small Pfam family, the generation regime preserved amino acid composition far more faithfully than a variational autoencoder at matched novelty, indicating that the training-free score function retained family-level fidelity that learned models lost. A denoising diffusion baseline failed across all memory sizes tested, producing samples indistinguishable from isotropic noise. The approach required no architectural changes to the underlying attention mechanism.
Mar 6, 2026

Improved high-dimensional estimation with Langevin dynamics and stochastic weight averaging

Significant recent work has studied the ability of gradient descent to recover a hidden planted direction θ⋆∈Sd−1θ^\star \in S^{d-1} in different high-dimensional settings, including tensor PCA and single-index models. The key quantity that governs the ability of gradient descent to traverse these landscapes is the information exponent k⋆k^\star (Ben Arous et al., (2021)), which corresponds to the order of the saddle at initialization in the population landscape. Ben Arous et al., (2021) showed that n≳dmax⁡(1,k⋆−1)n \gtrsim d^{\max(1, k^\star-1)} samples were necessary and sufficient for online SGD to recover θ⋆θ^\star, and Ben Arous et al., (2020) proved a similar lower bound for Langevin dynamics. More recently, Damian et al., (2023) showed it was possible to circumvent these lower bounds by running gradient descent on a smoothed landscape, and that this algorithm succeeds with n≳dmax⁡(1,k⋆/2)n \gtrsim d^{\max(1, k^\star/2)} samples, which is optimal in the worst case. This raises the question of whether it is possible to achieve the same rate without explicit smoothing. In this paper, we show that Langevin dynamics can succeed with n≳dk⋆/2n \gtrsim d^{ k^\star/2 } samples if one considers the average iterate, rather than the last iterate. The key idea is that the combination of noise-injection and iterate averaging is able to emulate the effect of landscape smoothing. We apply this result to both the tensor PCA and single-index model settings. Finally, we conjecture that minibatch SGD can also achieve the same rate without adding any additional noise.
Mar 4, 2026

Riemannian Langevin Dynamics: Strong Convergence of Geometric Euler-Maruyama Scheme

Low-dimensional structure in real-world data plays an important role in the success of generative models, which motivates diffusion models defined on intrinsic data manifolds. Such models are driven by stochastic differential equations (SDEs) on manifolds, which raises the need for convergence theory of numerical schemes for manifold-valued SDEs. In Euclidean space, the Euler--Maruyama (EM) scheme achieves strong convergence with order 1/21/2, but an analogous result for manifold discretizations is less understood in general settings. In this work, we study a geometric version of the EM scheme for SDEs on Riemannian manifolds and prove strong convergence with order 1/21/2 under geometric and regularity conditions. As an application, we obtain a Wasserstein bound for sampling on manifolds via the geometric EM discretization of Riemannian Langevin dynamics.
Mar 2, 2026

Dimension-Independent Convergence of Underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo in KL Divergence

Underdamped Langevin dynamics (ULD) is a widely-used sampler for Gibbs distributions π∝e−Vπ\propto e^{-V}, and is often empirically effective in high dimensions. However, existing non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for discretized ULD typically scale polynomially with the ambient dimension dd, leading to vacuous bounds when dd is large. The main known dimension-free result concerns the randomized midpoint discretization in Wasserstein-2 distance (Liu et al.,2023), while dimension-independent guarantees for ULD discretizations in KL divergence have remained open. We close this gap by proving the first dimension-free KL divergence bounds for discretized ULD. Our analysis refines the KL local error framework (Altschuler et al., 2025) to a dimension-free setting and yields bounds that depend on tr(H)\mathrm{tr}(\mathbf{H}), where H\mathbf{H} upper bounds the Hessian of VV, rather than on dd. As a consequence, we obtain improved iteration complexity for underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo relative to overdamped Langevin methods in regimes where tr(H)≪d\mathrm{tr}(\mathbf{H})\ll d.
Feb 20, 2026

Leakage and Second-Order Dynamics Improve Hippocampal RNN Replay

Biological neural networks (like the hippocampus) can internally generate "replay" resembling stimulus-driven activity. Recent computational models of replay use noisy recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained to path-integrate. Replay in these networks has been described as Langevin sampling, but new modifiers of noisy RNN replay have surpassed this description. We re-examine noisy RNN replay as sampling to understand or improve it in three ways: (1) Under simple assumptions, we prove that the gradients replay activity should follow are time-varying and difficult to estimate, but readily motivate the use of hidden state leakage in RNNs for replay. (2) We confirm that hidden state adaptation (negative feedback) encourages exploration in replay, but show that it incurs non-Markov sampling that also slows replay. (3) We propose the first model of temporally compressed replay in noisy path-integrating RNNs through hidden state momentum, connect it to underdamped Langevin sampling, and show that, together with adaptation, it counters slowness while maintaining exploration. We verify our findings via path-integration of 2D triangular and T-maze paths and of high-dimensional paths of synthetic rat place cell activity.
Oct 14, 2025

RNAGenScape: Property-Guided, Optimized Generation of mRNA Sequences with Manifold Langevin Dynamics

Generating property-optimized mRNA sequences is central to applications such as vaccine design and protein replacement therapy, but remains challenging due to limited data, complex sequence-function relationships, and the narrow space of biologically viable sequences. Generative methods that drift away from the data manifold can yield sequences that fail to fold, translate poorly, or are otherwise nonfunctional. We present RNAGenScape, a property-guided manifold Langevin dynamics framework for mRNA sequence generation that operates on a learned manifold of real data. By performing iterative local optimization constrained to this manifold, RNAGenScape preserves favorable computational viability proxies, accesses reliable guidance, and discourages excursions into regions poorly supported by the training data. The framework integrates three components: (1) an autoencoder jointly trained with a property predictor to learn a property-organized latent manifold, (2) a denoising autoencoder that projects updates back onto the manifold, and (3) a property-guided Langevin dynamics procedure that performs optimization along the manifold. Across three real-world mRNA datasets spanning two orders of magnitude in size, RNAGenScape increases median oracle-predicted property gain by up to 267% and success rate by up to 31%, while maintaining good biological viability proxy measures and achieving competitive inference efficiency compared to existing generative approaches.
Jul 16, 2025

CoCre-Sam (Kokkuri-san): Modeling Ouija Board as Collective Langevin Dynamics Sampling from Fused Language Models

Collective human activities like using an Ouija board (or Kokkuri-san) often produce emergent, coherent linguistic outputs unintended by any single participant. While psychological explanations such as the ideomotor effect exist, a computational understanding of how decentralized, implicit linguistic knowledge fuses through shared physical interaction remains elusive. We introduce CoCre-Sam (Collective-Creature Sampling), a framework modeling this phenomenon as collective Langevin dynamics sampling from implicitly fused language models. Each participant is represented as an agent associated with an energy landscape derived from an internal language model reflecting linguistic priors, and agents exert stochastic forces based on local energy gradients. We theoretically prove that the collective motion of the shared pointer (planchette) corresponds to Langevin MCMC sampling from the sum of individual energy landscapes, representing fused collective knowledge. Simulations validate that CoCre-Sam dynamics effectively fuse different models and generate meaningful character sequences, while ablation studies confirm the essential roles of collective interaction and stochasticity. Altogether, CoCre-Sam provides a novel computational mechanism linking individual implicit knowledge, embodied collective action, and emergent linguistic phenomena, grounding these complex interactions in the principles of probabilistic sampling.