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Related papers: GFlowNets and variational inference

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Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs) has been recently proposed as one of the most promising direction to universal generative modelling, having ability to learn any of the data type. Their power comes from the expressiveness of neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Mateusz Pyla , Kamil Deja , Bartłomiej Twardowski , Tomasz Trzciński

The unsupervised task of aligning two or more distributions in a shared latent space has many applications including fair representations, batch effect mitigation, and unsupervised domain adaptation. Existing flow-based approaches estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Zeyu Zhou , Ziyu Gong , Pradeep Ravikumar , David I. Inouye

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) treat sampling from distributions over compositional discrete spaces as a sequential decision-making problem, training a stochastic policy to construct objects step by step. Recent studies have revealed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Nikita Morozov , Daniil Tiapkin , Sergey Samsonov , Alexey Naumov , Dmitry Vetrov

The causal (belief) network is a well-known graphical structure for representing independencies in a joint probability distribution. The exact methods and the approximation methods, which perform probabilistic inference in causal networks,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-05 Richard E. Neapolitan , James Kenevan

This note compares two recently published machine learning methods for constructing flexible, but tractable families of variational hidden-variable posteriors. The first method, called "hierarchical variational models" enriches the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-10 Niko Brümmer

In GFlowNets and variational inference, it has been shown that the mean square error between target and model log probabilities is an effective, low variance, surrogate loss for training generative models. This loss has the property that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jake Fawkes , Jason Hartford

To obtain uncertainty estimates with real-world Bayesian deep learning models, practical inference approximations are needed. Dropout variational inference (VI) for example has been used for machine vision and medical applications, but VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Yingzhen Li , Yarin Gal

Traditional neural networks are simple to train but they typically produce overconfident predictions. In contrast, Bayesian neural networks provide good uncertainty quantification but optimizing them is time consuming due to the large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Yadi Wei , Roni Khardon

This paper introduces Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs), a new class of generative model in which the parameters of a set of independent distributions are modified with Bayesian inference in the light of noisy data samples, then passed as input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Alex Graves , Rupesh Kumar Srivastava , Timothy Atkinson , Faustino Gomez

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Luca Franceschi , Mathias Niepert , Massimiliano Pontil , Xiao He

Many algorithms and applications involve repeatedly solving variations of the same inference problem; for example we may want to introduce new evidence to the model or perform updates to conditional dependencies. The goal of adaptive…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Umut A. Acar , Alexander T. Ihler , Ramgopal Mettu , Ozgur Sumer

Flow-based generative models, including diffusion models, excel at modeling continuous distributions in high-dimensional spaces. In this work, we introduce Flow Policy Optimization (FPO), a simple on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 David McAllister , Songwei Ge , Brent Yi , Chung Min Kim , Ethan Weber , Hongsuk Choi , Haiwen Feng , Angjoo Kanazawa

Deep feedforward neural networks (DFNNs) are a powerful tool for functional approximation. We describe flexible versions of generalized linear and generalized linear mixed models incorporating basis functions formed by a DFNN. The…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-28 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Nghia Nguyen , David Nott , Robert Kohn

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We benchmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational…

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets or GFNs) are probabilistic models predicated on Markov flows, and they employ specific amortization algorithms to learn stochastic policies that generate compositional substances including biomolecules,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuai Guo , Jielei Chu , Lin Ma , Zhaoyu Li , Tianrui Li

Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba-…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-01 Qiang Liu , Yihao Feng

Initial work on variational autoencoders assumed independent latent variables with simple distributions. Subsequent work has explored incorporating more complex distributions and dependency structures: including normalizing flows in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Jacobie Mouton , Steve Kroon

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on a wide variety of tasks. However, quantifying uncertainty in the network's output is a challenging task. Bayesian models offer a mathematical framework to reason about model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Manikanta Srikar Yellapragada , Chandra Prakash Konkimalla

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are \emph{discriminative models} that directly model the class posterior $p(y|\mathbf{x})$ for semi-supervised classification of graph data. While being effective, as a representation learning approach,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Tianchun Wang , Farzaneh Mirzazadeh , Xiang Zhang , Jie Chen