Complexity of zigzag sampling algorithm for strongly log-concave distributions

We study the computational complexity of zigzag sampling algorithm for strongly log-concave distributions. The zigzag process has the advantage of not requiring time discretization for implementation, and that each proposed bouncing event requires only one evaluation of partial derivative of the potential, while its convergence rate is dimension independent. Using these properties, we prove that the zigzag sampling algorithm achieves $\varepsilon$ error in chi-square divergence with a computational cost equivalent to $O\bigl(\kappa^2 d^\frac{1}{2}(\log\frac{1}{\varepsilon})^{\frac{3}{2}}\bigr)$ gradient evaluations in the regime $\kappa \ll \frac{d}{\log d}$ under a warm start assumption, where $\kappa$ is the condition number and $d$ is the dimension

Chain of Log-Concave Markov Chains

We introduce a theoretical framework for sampling from unnormalized densities based on a smoothing scheme that uses an isotropic Gaussian kernel with a single fixed noise scale. We prove one can decompose sampling from a density (minimal assumptions made on the density) into a sequence of sampling from log-concave conditional densities via accumulation of noisy measurements with equal noise levels. Our construction is unique in that it keeps track of a history of samples, making it non-Markovian as a whole, but it is lightweight algorithmically as the history only shows up in the form of a running empirical mean of samples. Our sampling algorithm generalizes walk-jump sampling (Saremi & Hyv\"arinen, 2019). The "walk" phase becomes a (non-Markovian) chain of (log-concave) Markov chains. The "jump" from the accumulated measurements is obtained by empirical Bayes. We study our sampling algorithm quantitatively using the 2-Wasserstein metric and compare it with various Langevin MCMC algorithms. We also report a remarkable capacity of our algorithm to "tunnel" between modes of a distribution

On the Posterior Distribution in Denoising: Application to Uncertainty Quantification

Denoisers play a central role in many applications, from noise suppression in low-grade imaging sensors, to empowering score-based generative models. The latter category of methods makes use of Tweedie's formula, which links the posterior mean in Gaussian denoising (i.e., the minimum MSE denoiser) with the score of the data distribution. Here, we derive a fundamental relation between the higher-order central moments of the posterior distribution, and the higher-order derivatives of the posterior mean. We harness this result for uncertainty quantification of pre-trained denoisers. Particularly, we show how to efficiently compute the principal components of the posterior distribution for any desired region of an image, as well as to approximate the full marginal distribution along those (or any other) one-dimensional directions. Our method is fast and memory efficient, as it does not explicitly compute or store the high-order moment tensors and it requires no training or fine tuning of the denoiser. Code and examples are available on the project's webpage in https://hilamanor.github.io/GaussianDenoisingPosterior/Comment: Code and examples are available on the project's webpage in https://hilamanor.github.io/GaussianDenoisingPosterior