Consensus-Based Sampling
Consensus-Based Optimisation (CBO) solves the problem of minimising a function $f$ by computing weighted means of the associated "Gibbs-like" distribution $\exp(-\alpha f(x))$. A related problem is the sampling problem:
Given a target distribution $g(x)=\mathbb{R}^D \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^+$, find $N$ independent samples $X^i \in \mathbb{R}^D$ from the random variable $X$ with $\operatorname*{Law}(X) = g$. Informally, this means that a normalised histogram of $X^i$ will resemble $g(x)$ when $N$ is large.
Consensus-based sampling (CBS) is an approach to the sampling problem in the case $g(x) \propto \exp(-\alpha f(x))$. This is a common scenario that arises, for instance, in Bayesian inference. It uses the same consensus point as CBO,
\[c_\alpha(x_t) = \frac{1}{ \sum_{i=1}^N \omega_\alpha(x_t^i) } \sum_{i=1}^N x_t^i \, \omega_\alpha(x_t^i), \quad\text{where}\quad \omega_\alpha(\,\cdot\,) = \mathrm{exp}(-\alpha f(\,\cdot\,)),\]
for some $\alpha>0$. It additionally defines a weighted covariance matrix,
\[V_\alpha(x_t) = \frac{1}{ \sum_{i=1}^N \omega_\alpha(x_t^i) } \sum_{i=1}^N \left( x_t^i - c_\alpha(x_t) \right) \otimes \left( x_t^i - c_\alpha(x_t) \right) \, \omega_\alpha(x_t^i).\]
On each method iteration, the particles evolve in time following the rule
\[x_{n+1}^i = \underbrace{ \beta x_n^i + (1-\beta) c_\alpha(x_n) }_{ \text{consensus drift} } + \sqrt{\frac{ 1 - \beta^2 }{ \lambda }}\ \underbrace{ V_\alpha^{\frac{1}{2}}(x_n) \xi^i }_{ \text{scaled diffusion} },\]
where $\beta\in(0,1)$ is an interpolation parameter, and where $\xi^i$ are independent standard normal random variables in $D$ dimensions. The consensus drift is a deterministic interpolation towards the consensus point; meanwhile, the scaled diffusion is a stochastic term that controls the variance of $x_n^i$. This update rule can be understood as a numerical scheme for an SDE with a time step $\Delta t$, where $\beta = \exp(-\Delta t)$. The corresponding SDE would be
\[\mathrm{d}x_t^i = - \underbrace{ \left( x_t^i - c_\alpha(x_t) \right) \mathrm{d}t }_{ \text{consensus drift} } + \sqrt{2\lambda^{-1}}\ \underbrace{ V_\alpha^{\frac{1}{2}}(x_t) \mathrm{d}B_t^i }_{ \text{scaled diffusion} }.\]
The matrix $V_\alpha^{\frac{1}{2}}(x_t)$ is the matrix square-root of the covariance $V_\alpha(x_t)$, in the sense that $V_\alpha = V_\alpha^{\frac{1}{2}} \left( V_\alpha^{\frac{1}{2}} \right) ^T$. An alternative (distributionally equivalent) covariance square-root is given in A. Garbuno-Inigo, N. Nüsken, and S. Reich (2020), and also implemented in ConsensusBasedX.jl (see Root-covariance types). By default, the version with the best performance is selected, as a function of $D$ and $N$.
The parameter $\lambda$ controls the overall behaviour of the algorithm. If $\lambda = (1+\alpha)^{-1}$, the particles will converge in time towards the distribution $\exp(-\alpha f(x))$; therefore, their final positions are approximately samples of the target distribution. If $\lambda = 1$, the particles will converge towards the consensus point, which will be an approximation of the global minimiser of $f$, just as in CBO.
For additional details, see J. A. Carrillo, F. Hoffmann, A. M. Stuart, and U. Vaes (2022). Note that, in their notation, the roles of $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are switched.