activity
20242026
collaborators

7 papers

stat.CO2026

Mixing times of data-augmentation Gibbs samplers for high-dimensional probit regression

Filippo Ascolani, Giacomo Zanella

We investigate the convergence properties of popular data-augmentation samplers for Baye\-sian probit regression. Leveraging recent results on Gibbs samplers for log-concave target…

math.PR2026

Entropy contraction of the Gibbs sampler under log-concavity

Filippo Ascolani, Hugo Lavenant, Giacomo Zanella

The Gibbs sampler (a.k.a. Glauber dynamics and heat-bath algorithm) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm which iteratively samples from the conditional distributions of…

stat.CO2026

Scalability of Metropolis-within-Gibbs schemes for high-dimensional Bayesian models

Filippo Ascolani, Gareth O. Roberts, Giacomo Zanella

We study general coordinate-wise MCMC schemes (such as Metropolis-within-Gibbs samplers), which are commonly used to fit Bayesian non-conjugate hierarchical models. We relate their…

stat.ML2025

Error Bounds and Optimal Schedules for Masked Diffusions with Factorized Approximations

Hugo Lavenant, Giacomo Zanella

Recently proposed generative models for discrete data, such as Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs), exploit conditional independence approximations to reduce the computational cost of p…

stat.CO2025

A fast non-reversible sampler for Bayesian finite mixture models

Filippo Ascolani, Giacomo Zanella

Finite mixtures are a cornerstone of Bayesian modelling, and it is well-known that sampling from the resulting posterior distribution can be a hard task. In particular, popular rev…

stat.ML2024

Convergence rate of random scan Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference under log-concavity

Hugo Lavenant, Giacomo Zanella

The Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference scheme is a popular algorithm used to compute the mean-field approximation of a probability distribution of interest. We analyze its ran…