Convergence of time-discrete finite particle consensus based optimization in Hilbert spaces

Abstract

We study a time-discrete, finite-particle Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO) algorithm in a separable Hilbert space. Our analysis provides convergence guarantees directly for the computable particle system, complementing recent continuous-time and mean-field results in infinite dimensions. Using a common-noise formulation with trace-class covariance, we first establish quantitative pairwise contraction, exponential decay of the expected swarm variance, and almost-sure convergence of all particles to a common consensus state. We then combine estimates on the exponentiated objective functional with a quantitative Laplace principle to show that, for sufficiently large inverse temperature and suitably prepared initial data, the energy of the limiting consensus state can be made arbitrarily close to the global minimum over the active subspace. A key feature of the Hilbert-space formulation is that the stochastic contribution to the convergence estimates is controlled by the trace of the covariance operator and is therefore uniform with respect to the Galerkin dimension. Numerical experiments on an elliptic energy minimization problem with mixed boundary conditions and a PDE-constrained inverse source problem validate the theoretical convergence results and demonstrate stable performance under increasing spatial resolution, in contrast with CBO based on isotropic finite-dimensional noise.