Compressed sensing with a tunable random sampling strategy has great potential in reducing the energy/time consumption during the constant acquisition of external information, thereby it is considered one of the most promising sensing strategies in edge-terminal. In this letter, a novel tunable stochastic oscillator (TSO) based on the VO ₂ /TaO _x structure was proposed and employed as the core controlling device for compressed sensing. The TSO is jointly governed by the metal-insulator-transition (IMT) based threshold switching of the VO ₂ layer and the stochastic resistive switching by the TaO _x layer. The tunable memristor/resistor in series can modulate the oscillation frequency of the TSO. The orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm is implemented to reconstruct the compressed sparse signals, demonstrating a good performance of TSO in compressed sensing.