Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a combination of a Robbins-Monro type algorithm with Langevin dynamics. In this paper, the SGLD method with fixed step size @math is considered in order to sample from a logconcave target distribution @math , known up to a normalisation factor. We assume that unbiased estimates of the gradient from possibly dependent observations are available. It is shown that, for all @math , the Wasserstein- @math distance of the @math th iterate of the SGLD algorithm from @math is dominated by @math with appropriate constants @math and @math , whereas for the case of i.i.d. data the upper bound is improved to @math .
Discrete time analogues of ergodic stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are one of the most popular and flexible tools for sampling high-dimensional probability measures. Non-asymptotic analysis in the @math Wasserstein distance of sampling algorithms based on Euler discretisations of SDEs has been recently developed by several authors for log-concave probability distributions. In this work we replace the log-concavity assumption with a log-concavity at infinity condition. We provide novel @math convergence rates for Euler schemes, expressed explicitly in terms of problem parameters. From there we derive non-asymptotic bounds on the distance between the laws induced by Euler schemes and the invariant laws of SDEs, both for schemes with standard and with randomised (inaccurate) drifts. We also obtain bounds for the hierarchy of discretisation, which enables us to deploy a multi-level Monte Carlo estimator. Our proof relies on a novel construction of a coupling for the Markov chains that can be used to control both the @math and @math Wasserstein distances simultaneously. Finally, we provide a weak convergence analysis that covers both the standard and the randomised (inaccurate) drift case. In particular, we reveal that the variance of the randomised drift does not influence the rate of weak convergence of the Euler scheme to the SDE. We present a unified framework to analyze the global convergence of Langevin dynamics based algorithms for nonconvex finite-sum optimization with @math component functions. At the core of our analysis is a direct analysis of the ergodicity of the numerical approximations to Langevin dynamics, which leads to faster convergence rates. Specifically, we show that gradient Langevin dynamics (GLD) and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) converge to the almost minimizer within @math and @math stochastic gradient evaluations respectively, where @math is the problem dimension, and @math is the spectral gap of the Markov chain generated by GLD. Both of the results improve upon the best known gradient complexity results. Furthermore, for the first time we prove the global convergence guarantee for variance reduced stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (VR-SGLD) to the almost minimizer after @math stochastic gradient evaluations, which outperforms the gradient complexities of GLD and SGLD in a wide regime. Our theoretical analyses shed some light on using Langevin dynamics based algorithms for nonconvex optimization with provable guarantees. Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows SGLD to escape local minima and suffices to guarantee asymptotic convergence to global minimizers for sufficiently regular non-convex objectives (Gelfand and Mitter, 1991). The present work provides a nonasymptotic analysis in the context of non-convex learning problems, giving finite-time guarantees for SGLD to find approximate minimizers of both empirical and population risks. As in the asymptotic setting, our analysis relates the discrete-time SGLD Markov chain to a continuous-time diffusion process. A new tool that drives the results is the use of weighted transportation cost inequalities to quantify the rate of convergence of SGLD to a stationary distribution in the Euclidean @math -Wasserstein distance.