Geometric Ergodicity of Affine Invariant Ensemble Langevin and its Discrete Time Variants

Abstract

Affine-invariant ensemble samplers are widely used in Bayesian applications. However, their quantitative convergence theory, in particular geometric ergodicity, remains a basic open question. We study the affine invariant ensemble Langevin dynamics, an interacting particle system that uses the empirical covariance of the whole ensemble as a preconditioner. While effective in practice, theoretical understanding of this method is not available beyond plain qualitative convergence in total variation; a central difficulty is that the empirical covariance can approach singularity. This paper addresses this challenge. For potentials with bounded Hessian that are strongly convex outside a ball, we prove geometric ergodicity using a novel Lyapunov function that combines an inverse-covariance barrier with a coercive exponential energy. We then show that directly applying the Euler--Maruyama scheme can diverge with positive probability, even for a one-dimensional Gaussian target. This motivates a covariance-trace time regularization. We prove geometric ergodicity of the regularized diffusion and, for sufficiently small step size, of its unadjusted Euler--Maruyama discretization. We also show that the invariant distributions of the discretization converge weakly to the product target distribution as the step size tends to zero.