Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We give faster algorithms for sampling from the uniform distribution over a polytope. Our main result is an algorithm that, when applied to a polytope with $m$ constraints in $n$ dimensions, uses $m \cdot \mathrm{poly}\log(\frac m δ)$ iterations, each running in time $O(mn^{ω- 1})$, to return a sample within total variation distance $δ$ to the uniform distribution. When $m =O(n)$ and $δ= \mathrm{poly}(\frac 1 n)$, our runtime improves upon all prior works by an $Ω(n^{2/3})$ factor. Our sampler is based on the recent \emph{functional stochastic localization} framework of [GST26], and achieves an iteration count nearly matching the Poincaré constant of the uniform distribution with respect to the logarithmic barrier.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Gu, Anming, Shi, Bobby, Tian, Kevin, Yang, Hubert
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222956479