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On sampling diluted Spin-Glasses using Glauber Dynamics
Proceedings of Thirty Seventh Conference on Learning Theory, PMLR 247:1501-1515, 2024.
Abstract
{\em Spin-glasses} are natural Gibbs distributions that have been studied in theoretical computer science for many decades. Recently, they have been gaining renewed attention from the community as they emerge naturally in {\em neural computation} and {\em learning}, {\em network inference}, {\em optimisation} and many other areas. Here we consider the {\em {2-spin model}} at inverse temperature β when the underlying graph is an instance of G(n,d/n), i.e., the random graph on n vertices such that each edge appears independently with probability d/n, where the expected degree d=Θ(1). We study the problem of efficiently sampling from the aforementioned distribution using the well-known Markov chain called {\em Glauber dynamics}. For a certain range of β, that depends only on the expected degree d of the graph, and for typical instances of the {2-spin model} on G(n,d/n), we show that the corresponding (single-site) Glauber dynamics exhibits mixing time O(n2+3log2d). The range of β for which we obtain our rapid mixing result corresponds to the expected influence being smaller than 1/d. We establish our results by utilising the well-known {\em path-coupling} technique. In the standard setting of Glauber dynamics on G(n,d/n) one has to deal with the so-called effect of high degree vertices. % in the path-coupling analysis. Here, with the spin-glasses, rather than considering vertex-degrees, it is more natural to use a different measure on the vertices of the graph, that we call {\em aggregate influence}. We build on the block-construction approach proposed by [Dyer, Flaxman, Frieze and Vigoda: 2006] to circumvent the problem with the high degrees in the path-coupling analysis. Specifically, to obtain our results, we first establish rapid mixing for an appropriately defined block-dynamics. We design this dynamics such that vertices of large aggregate influence are placed deep inside their blocks. Then, we obtain rapid mixing for the (single-site) Glauber dynamics by utilising a comparison argument.