Spectral Independence Beyond Uniqueness using the topological method

Abstract: We present novel results for fast mixing of Glauber dynamics using the newly introduced and powerful Spectral Independence method from [Anari, Liu, Oveis-Gharan: FOCS 2020]. In our results, the parameters of the Gibbs distribution are expressed in terms of the spectral radius of the adjacency matrix of $G$, or that of the Hashimoto non-backtracking matrix. The analysis relies on new techniques that we introduce to bound the maximum eigenvalue of the pairwise influence matrix $\mathcal{I}^{\Lambda,\tau}_{G}$ for the two spin Gibbs distribution $\mu$. There is a common framework that underlies these techniques which we call the topological method. The idea is to systematically exploit the well-known connections between $\mathcal{I}^{\Lambda,\tau}_{G}$ and the topological construction called tree of self-avoiding walks. Our approach is novel and gives new insights to the problem of establishing spectral independence for Gibbs distributions. More importantly, it allows us to derive new -- improved -- rapid mixing bounds for Glauber dynamics on distributions such as the Hard-core model and the Ising model for graphs that the spectral radius is smaller than the maximum degree.