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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

How Should Parallel Langevin Chains Share Noise?

Ryan Farell

Abstract

Parallel Langevin samplers are usually run as independent chains and then averaged. Independence is convenient, but it is not required by the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA): each chain only needs a standard Gaussian noise marginal at each step. We use this freedom by coupling the same-step noises across chains. The coupling is simple: draw iid Gaussian noises, subtract their across-chain mean, and rescale. Each chain still has the ordinary ULA law, but the noise injected into the ensemble average is exactly zero. For quadratic targets, this removes the Langevin-noise contribution from every equal-weight linear summary of the ensemble mean at every finite horizon. With deterministic or zero-sum randomized starts, these summaries have zero total variance. On UCI Bayesian logistic posteriors with , the same construction reduces ensemble-mean trace variance to , , and of matched iid ensembles on WDBC, Spambase, and Adult; reference MSE against a longer iid run falls by roughly to after accounting for error in the finite reference run. The gain is scoped: zero-sum coupling cancels linear fluctuations, while centered quadratic observables have factor rather than iid's , and random starts, minibatches, and nonquadratic curvature add explicit residual variance terms. Synthetic and real-data experiments match the exact cancellation where it applies and the predicted behavior outside that regime.

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