Weak Poincaré Inequalities, Simulated Annealing, and Sampling from Spherical Spin Glasses

There has been a recent surge of powerful tools to show rapid mixing of Markov chains, via functional inequalities such as Poincaré inequalities. In many situations, Markov chains fail to mix rapidly from a worst-case initialization, yet are expected to approximately sample from a random initialization. For example, this occurs if the target distribution has metastable states, small clusters accounting for a vanishing fraction of the mass that are essentially disconnected from the bulk of the measure. Under such conditions, a Poincaré inequality cannot hold, necessitating new tools to prove sampling guarantees. We develop a framework to analyze simulated annealing, based on establishing so-called weak Poincaré inequalities. These inequalities imply mixing from a suitably warm start, and simulated annealing provides a way to chain such warm starts together into a sampling algorithm. We further identify a local-to-global principle to prove weak Poincaré inequalities, mirroring the spectral independence and localization schemes frameworks for analyzing mixing times of Markov chains. As our main application, we prove that simulated annealing samples from the Gibbs measure of a spherical spin glass for inverse temperatures up to a natural threshold, matching recent algorithms based on algorithmic stochastic localization. This provides the first Markov chain sampling guarantee that holds beyond the uniqueness threshold for spherical spin glasses, where mixing from a worst-case initialization is provably slow due to the presence of metastable states. As an ingredient in our proof, we prove bounds on the operator norm of the covariance matrix of spherical spin glasses in the full replica-symmetric regime. Additionally, we resolve a question related to sampling using data-based initializations.