Optimal Sublinear Sampling of Spanning Trees and Determinantal Point Processes via Average-Case Entropic Independence

We design fast algorithms for repeatedly sampling from strongly Rayleigh distributions, which include as special cases random spanning tree distributions and determinantal point processes. For a graph $G=(V,\ E)$, we show how to approximately sample uniformly random spanning trees from G in $O(|V|)$¹ time per sample after an initial $O(|E|)$ time preprocessing. This is the first nearly-linear runtime in the output size, which is clearly optimal. For a determinantal point process on k-sized subsets of a ground set of n elements, defined via an $n\times n$ kernel matrix, we show how to approximately sample in ${\widetilde{O}}(k^{\omega})$ time after an initial ${\widetilde{O}}(nk^{\omega-1})$ time preprocessing, where $\omega\lt 2.372864$ is the matrix multiplication exponent. The time to compute just the weight of the output set is simply $\simeq k^{\omega}$, a natural barrier that suggests our runtime might be optimal for determinantal point processes as well. As a corollary, we even improve the state of the art for obtaining a single sample from a determinantal point process, from the prior runtime of ${\widetilde{O}}(\min\{nk^{2},\ n^{\omega}\})$ to ${\widetilde{O}}(nk^{\omega-1})$.In our main technical result, we achieve the optimal limit on domain sparsification for strongly Rayleigh distributions. In domain sparsification, sampling from a distribution $\mu$ on $\binom{[n]}{k}$ is reduced to sampling from related distributions on $\binom{[t]}{k}$ for $t\ll n$. We show that for strongly Rayleigh distributions, the domain size can be reduced to nearly linear in the output size $t={\widetilde{O}}(k)$, improving the state of the art from $t={\widetilde{O}}(k^{2})$ for general strongly Rayleigh distributions and the more specialized $t={\widetilde{O}}(k^{15})$ for sBanning tree distributions. Our reduction involves sampling from ${\widetilde{O}}(1)$ domain-sparsified distributions, all of which can be produced efficiently assuming approximate overestimates for marginals of $\mu$ are known and stored in a convenient data structure. Having access to marginals is the discrete analog of having access to the mean and covariance of a continuous distribution, or equivalently knowing “isotropy” for the distribution, the key behind optimal samplers in the continuous setting based on the famous Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits (KLS) conjecture. We view our result as analogous in spirit to the KLS conjecture and its consequences for sampling, but rather for discrete strongly Rayleigh measures.¹Throughout, ${\widetilde{O}}(\cdot)$ hides polylogarithmic factors in n.