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Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a novel class of generative models designed to sample from unnormalized distributions and have found applications in various important tasks, attracting great research interest in their training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Rui Hu , Yifan Zhang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

Thompson sampling (TS) is a popular heuristic for action selection, but it requires sampling from a posterior distribution. Unfortunately, this can become computationally intractable in complex environments, such as those modeled using…

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized inference models designed to sample from unnormalized distributions over composable objects, with applications in generative modeling for tasks in fields such as causal discovery, NLP, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Tiago da Silva , Eliezer de Souza da Silva , Diego Mesquita

We present GFlowState, a visual analytics system designed to illuminate the training process of Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets or GFNs). GFlowNets are a probabilistic framework for generating samples proportionally to a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Florian Holeczek , Andreas Hinterreiter , Alex Hernandez-Garcia , Marc Streit , Christina Humer

Efficiently identifying the right trajectories for training remains an open problem in GFlowNets. To address this, it is essential to prioritize exploration in regions of the state space where the reward distribution has not been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Sajan Muhammad , Salem Lahlou

Thompson sampling is an efficient algorithm for sequential decision making, which exploits the posterior uncertainty to address the exploration-exploitation dilemma. There has been significant recent interest in integrating Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-07 Zhendong Wang , Mingyuan Zhou

Many crucial scientific problems involve designing novel molecules with desired properties, which can be formulated as a black-box optimization problem over the discrete chemical space. In practice, multiple conflicting objectives and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Yiheng Zhu , Jialu Wu , Chaowen Hu , Jiahuan Yan , Chang-Yu Hsieh , Tingjun Hou , Jian Wu

Thompson Sampling (TS) is one of the most effective algorithms for solving contextual multi-armed bandit problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Neural Thompson Sampling, which adapts deep neural networks for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Lihong Li , Quanquan Gu

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a family of generative models that learn to sample objects from a given probability distribution, potentially known up to a normalizing constant. Instead of working in the object space, GFlowNets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Nikita Morozov , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Tiapkin , Sergey Samsonov

Thompson sampling is a widely used strategy for contextual bandits: at each round, it samples a reward function from a Bayesian posterior and acts greedily under that sample. Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), such as TabPFN v2+ and TabICL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Yan Shuo Tan , Kenyon Ng , Ruizhe Deng , Sumetha Loganathan , Qiong Zhang , Bibhas Chakraborty

Recently, it has been shown how sampling actions from the predictive distribution over the optimal action-sometimes called Thompson sampling-can be applied to solve sequential adaptive control problems, when the optimal policy is known for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-09-24 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun

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…

Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Abhimanyu Dubey , Alex Pentland

We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Kartik Anand Pant , Amod Hegde , K. V. Srinivas

We consider the problem of sampling from a discrete and structured distribution as a sequential decision problem, where the objective is to find a stochastic policy such that objects are sampled at the end of this sequential process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Tristan Deleu , Padideh Nouri , Nikolay Malkin , Doina Precup , Yoshua Bengio

We study the problem of online multi-task learning where the tasks are performed within similar but not necessarily identical multi-armed bandit environments. In particular, we study how a learner can improve its overall performance across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zhi Wang , Chicheng Zhang , Kamalika Chaudhuri

There are many frameworks for deep generative modeling, each often presented with their own specific training algorithms and inference methods. Here, we demonstrate the connections between existing deep generative models and the recently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Dinghuai Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen , Nikolay Malkin , Yoshua Bengio

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Dinghuai Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen , Cheng-Hao Liu , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

Thompson sampling is a heuristic algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem which has a long tradition in machine learning. The algorithm has a Bayesian spirit in the sense that it selects arms based on posterior samples of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Yi Liu , Veronika Rockova

Thompson sampling (TS) has emerged as a robust technique for contextual bandit problems. However, TS requires posterior inference and optimization for action generation, prohibiting its use in many online platforms where latency and ease of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Hongseok Namkoong , Samuel Daulton , Eytan Bakshy