A Separation in Heavy-Tailed Sampling: Gaussian vs. Stable Oracles for Proximal Samplers

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: He, Ye, Mousavi-Hosseini, Alireza, Balasubramanian, Krishnakumar, Erdogdu, Murat A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910460202188800
author He, Ye
Mousavi-Hosseini, Alireza
Balasubramanian, Krishnakumar
Erdogdu, Murat A.
author_facet He, Ye
Mousavi-Hosseini, Alireza
Balasubramanian, Krishnakumar
Erdogdu, Murat A.
contents We study the complexity of heavy-tailed sampling and present a separation result in terms of obtaining high-accuracy versus low-accuracy guarantees i.e., samplers that require only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ versus $Ω(\text{poly}(1/\varepsilon))$ iterations to output a sample which is $\varepsilon$-close to the target in $χ^2$-divergence. Our results are presented for proximal samplers that are based on Gaussian versus stable oracles. We show that proximal samplers based on the Gaussian oracle have a fundamental barrier in that they necessarily achieve only low-accuracy guarantees when sampling from a class of heavy-tailed targets. In contrast, proximal samplers based on the stable oracle exhibit high-accuracy guarantees, thereby overcoming the aforementioned limitation. We also prove lower bounds for samplers under the stable oracle and show that our upper bounds cannot be fundamentally improved.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16736
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Separation in Heavy-Tailed Sampling: Gaussian vs. Stable Oracles for Proximal Samplers
He, Ye
Mousavi-Hosseini, Alireza
Balasubramanian, Krishnakumar
Erdogdu, Murat A.
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
We study the complexity of heavy-tailed sampling and present a separation result in terms of obtaining high-accuracy versus low-accuracy guarantees i.e., samplers that require only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ versus $Ω(\text{poly}(1/\varepsilon))$ iterations to output a sample which is $\varepsilon$-close to the target in $χ^2$-divergence. Our results are presented for proximal samplers that are based on Gaussian versus stable oracles. We show that proximal samplers based on the Gaussian oracle have a fundamental barrier in that they necessarily achieve only low-accuracy guarantees when sampling from a class of heavy-tailed targets. In contrast, proximal samplers based on the stable oracle exhibit high-accuracy guarantees, thereby overcoming the aforementioned limitation. We also prove lower bounds for samplers under the stable oracle and show that our upper bounds cannot be fundamentally improved.
title A Separation in Heavy-Tailed Sampling: Gaussian vs. Stable Oracles for Proximal Samplers
topic Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16736