Sampling as Bandits: Evaluation-Efficient Design for Black-Box Densities

Abstract: We introduce bandit importance sampling (BIS), a new class of importance sampling methods designed for settings where the target density is expensive to evaluate. In contrast to adaptive importance sampling, which optimises a proposal distribution, BIS directly designs the samples through a sequential strategy that combines space-filling designs with multi-armed bandits. Our method leverages Gaussian process surrogates to guide sample selection, enabling efficient exploration of the parameter space with minimal target evaluations. We establish theoretical guarantees on convergence and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method across a broad range of sampling tasks. BIS delivers accurate approximations with fewer target evaluations, outperforming competing approaches across multimodal, heavy-tailed distributions, and real-world applications to Bayesian inference of computationally expensive models.