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Related papers: How to Train Your Energy-Based Models

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Energy-based models (EBMs) are a flexible class of deep generative models and are well-suited to capture complex dependencies in multimodal data. However, learning multimodal EBM by maximum likelihood requires Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Jiali Cui , Zhiqiang Lao , Heather Yu

Deep energy-based models (EBMs) are very flexible in distribution parametrization but computationally challenging because of the intractable partition function. They are typically trained via maximum likelihood, using contrastive divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-22 Lantao Yu , Yang Song , Jiaming Song , Stefano Ermon

Learning distributions over graph-structured data is a challenging task with many applications in biology and chemistry. In this work we use an energy-based model (EBM) based on multi-channel graph neural networks (GNN) to learn permutation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-31 Shiv Shankar

Energy-based models (EBMs) provide a powerful and flexible way of learning a joint probability distribution over data by constructing an energy surface. This energy surface enables insight extraction and conditional sampling. We apply EBMs…

Plasma Physics · Physics 2026-05-12 Phil Travis , Troy Carter

In this paper, we quantify the impact of using non-convergent Markov chains to train Energy-Based models (EBMs). In particular, we show analytically that EBMs trained with non-persistent short runs to estimate the gradient can perfectly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Elisabeth Agoritsas , Giovanni Catania , Aurélien Decelle , Beatriz Seoane

Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) is a popular method for training energy-based models (EBM) with intractable normalisation terms. The key idea of NCE is to learn by comparing unnormalised log-likelihoods of the reference and noisy…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Wanli Sun , Anton Ragni

Energy-Based Models (EBMs) provide a flexible framework for generative modeling, but their training remains theoretically challenging due to the need to approximate normalization constants and efficiently sample from complex, multi-modal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Davide Carbone

Energy-based models (EBMs) are a powerful class of probabilistic generative models due to their flexibility and interpretability. However, relationships between potential flows and explicit EBMs remain underexplored, while contrastive…

Energy-based language models (ELMs) parameterize an unnormalized distribution for natural sentences and are radically different from popular autoregressive language models (ALMs). As an important application, ELMs have been successfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Hong Liu , Zhaobiao Lv , Zhijian Ou , Wenbo Zhao , Qing Xiao

This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning energy-based model (EBM) in the latent space of the generator model. Learning such prior model typically requires running costly Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Instead, we propose to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zhisheng Xiao , Tian Han

Energy-based models (EBMs) exhibit a variety of desirable properties in predictive tasks, such as generality, simplicity and compositionality. However, training EBMs on high-dimensional datasets remains unstable and expensive. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Xiulong Yang , Shihao Ji

Autoregressive models (ARMs) currently constitute the dominant paradigm for large language models (LLMs). Energy-based models (EBMs) represent another class of models, which have historically been less prevalent in LLM development, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Mathieu Blondel , Michael E. Sander , Germain Vivier-Ardisson , Tianlin Liu , Vincent Roulet

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Peiyu Yu , Sirui Xie , Xiaojian Ma , Baoxiong Jia , Bo Pang , Ruiqi Gao , Yixin Zhu , Song-Chun Zhu , Ying Nian Wu

Recently there has been a lot of interest in non-autoregressive (non-AR) models for speech synthesis, such as FastSpeech 2 and diffusion models. Unlike AR models, these models do not have autoregressive dependencies among outputs which…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Wanli Sun , Zehai Tu , Anton Ragni

This work proposes a method for using any generator network as the foundation of an Energy-Based Model (EBM). Our formulation posits that observed images are the sum of unobserved latent variables passed through the generator network and a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Mitch Hill , Erik Nijkamp , Jonathan Mitchell , Bo Pang , Song-Chun Zhu

Energy-based models (EBMs) provide an elegant framework for density estimation, but they are notoriously difficult to train. Recent work has established links to generative adversarial networks, where the EBM is trained through a minimax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Cong Geng , Jia Wang , Zhiyong Gao , Jes Frellsen , Søren Hauberg

Reward models (RMs) are essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, they often struggle with capturing complex human preferences and generalizing to unseen data. To address these challenges, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Anamika Lochab , Ruqi Zhang

Machine learning models have exhibited exceptional results in various domains. The most prevalent approach for learning is the empirical risk minimizer (ERM), which adapts the model's weights to reduce the loss on a training set and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Koby Bibas

We study a new approach to learning energy-based models (EBMs) based on adversarial training (AT). We show that (binary) AT learns a special kind of energy function that models the support of the data distribution, and the learning process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Xuwang Yin , Shiying Li , Gustavo K. Rohde

We show that the bias of the approximate maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) objective of a persistent chain energy-based model (EBM) is precisely equal to the thermodynamic excess work of an overdamped Langevin dynamical system. We then…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-10-06 Jeff Hnybida , Simon Verret