  We propose a coupled rejection-sampling method for sampling from couplings of
arbitrary distributions. The method relies on accepting or rejecting coupled
samples coming from dominating marginals. Contrary to existing
acceptance-rejection coupling methods, the variance of the execution time of
the proposed method is limited and stays finite as the two target marginals
approach each other in the sense of the total variation norm. In the important
special case of coupling multivariate Gaussians with different means and
covariances, we derive positive lower bounds for the resulting coupling
probability of our algorithm, and we then show how the coupling method can be
optimized in closed form. Finally, we show how we can modify the coupled
rejection-sampling method to propose from coupled ensemble of proposals, so as
to asymptotically recover a maximal coupling. We then apply the method to the
problem of coupling rare events samplers, derive a parallel coupled resampling
algorithm to use in particle filtering, and show how the coupled
rejection-sampler can be used to speed up unbiased MCMC methods based on
couplings.

Methodology;Probability;Computation