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Rényi-infinity constrained sampling with d3d^3 membership queries

Abstract

Uniform sampling over a convex body is a fundamental algorithmic problem, yet the convergence in KL or R\ényi divergence of most samplers remains poorly understood. In this work, we propose a constrained proximal sampler, a principled and simple algorithm that possesses elegant convergence guarantees. Leveraging the uniform ergodicity of this sampler, we show that it converges in the R\ényi-infinity divergence (R\mathcal R_\infty) with no query complexity overhead when starting from a warm start. This is the strongest of commonly considered performance metrics, implying rates in {Rq,KL}\{\mathcal R_q, \mathsf{KL}\} convergence as special cases. By applying this sampler within an annealing scheme, we propose an algorithm which can approximately sample ε\varepsilon-close to the uniform distribution on convex bodies in R\mathcal R_\infty-divergence with O~(d3polylog1ε)\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^3\, \text{polylog} \frac{1}{\varepsilon}) query complexity. This improves on all prior results in {Rq,KL}\{\mathcal R_q, \mathsf{KL}\}-divergences, without resorting to any algorithmic modifications or post-processing of the sample. It also matches the prior best known complexity in total variation distance.

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