Universality of Spectral Independence with Applications to Fast Mixing in Spin Glasses

Abstract: We study Glauber dynamics for sampling from discrete distributions $\mu$ on the hypercube ${\pm 1}^n$. Recently, techniques based on spectral independence have successfully yielded optimal $O(n)$ relaxation times for a host of different distributions $\mu$. We show that spectral independence is universal: a relaxation time of $O(n)$ implies spectral independence. We then study a notion of tractability for $\mu$, defined in terms of smoothness of the multilinear extension of its Hamiltonian -- $\log \mu$ -- over $[-1,+1]^n$. We show that Glauber dynamics has relaxation time $O(n)$ for such $\mu$, and using the universality of spectral independence, we conclude that these distributions are also fractionally log-concave and consequently satisfy modified log-Sobolev inequalities. We sharpen our estimates and obtain approximate tensorization of entropy and the optimal $\widetilde{O}(n)$ mixing time for random Hamiltonians, i.e. the classically studied mixed $p$-spin model at sufficiently high temperature. These results have significant downstream consequences for concentration of measure, statistical testing, and learning.