Subpolynomial-Query Proximal Sampling Beyond Log-Concavity
Wei Guo, Bo Yuan, Ye He, Jiaming Liang, Molei Tao, Yongxin Chen
Abstract
We study the gradient query complexity of sampling from a density $π(x)\propto\mathrm{e}^{-V(x)}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $V$ has a $β$-Lipschitz gradient but need not be convex. Our approach uses the proximal sampler, which alternates Gaussian perturbation with sampling a position conditional on the noisy observation. We implement its observation chain using the high-order noisy conditional sampler of [OpenAI 2026], obtaining improved dimension dependence under functional inequalities. If $π$ satisfies a log-Sobolev inequality (LSI) with constant $α$, then for every fixed $ν>0$, there is a finite constant $C_ν$ depending only on $ν$ such that the algorithm returns a sample within total-variation distance $\varepsilon$ using at most $C_νκ(d+κ+\varepsilon^{-1}+\|\nabla V(x_0)\|^2/β)^ν$ queries, where $κ=β/α$ and $x_0$ is an arbitrary reference point for initialization. The analysis controls center-dependent local errors along exact proximal histories and removes the final observation noise by conditional decoding. Under a Poincaré inequality (PI), we obtain a corresponding guarantee from a warm start with a known bound on its Rényi divergence. An oracle lower bound shows that a stationary point alone, which suffices under LSI, is insufficient under PI.