Improved Guarantees for Langevin Monte Carlo with Average Smoothness

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Dalalyan, Arnak S., Karagulyan, Avetik
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Dalalyan, Arnak S.
Karagulyan, Avetik
author_facet Dalalyan, Arnak S.
Karagulyan, Avetik
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31413
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improved Guarantees for Langevin Monte Carlo with Average Smoothness
Dalalyan, Arnak S.
Karagulyan, Avetik
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
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.
title Improved Guarantees for Langevin Monte Carlo with Average Smoothness
topic Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31413