English
Related papers

Related papers: Generative Flow Networks: a Markov Chain Perspecti…

200 papers

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-05-12 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

Generative flow networks (GFNs) are a class of models for sequential sampling of composite objects, which approximate a target distribution that is defined in terms of an energy function or a reward. GFNs are typically trained using a flow…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-17 Heiko Zimmermann , Fredrik Lindsten , Jan-Willem van de Meent , Christian A. Naesseth

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generating composite structures, demonstrating considerable promise across diverse applications. While substantial progress has been made in exploring their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Tianshu Yu

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

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are powerful samplers for compositional objects that, by design, sample proportionally to a given non-negative reward. Nonetheless, in practice, they often struggle to explore the reward landscape…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Pedro Dall'Antonia , Tiago da Silva , Daniel Augusto de Souza , César Lincoln C. Mattos , Diego Mesquita

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a new family of probabilistic samplers, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to generate diverse sets of high-reward candidates, in contrast to standard return maximization approaches (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Haoran He , Can Chang , Huazhe Xu , Ling Pan

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets; GFNs) are a family of energy-based generative methods for combinatorial objects, capable of generating diverse and high-utility samples. However, consistently biasing GFNs towards producing high-utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Elaine Lau , Stephen Zhewen Lu , Ling Pan , Doina Precup , Emmanuel Bengio

Recent advances in MCMC use normalizing flows to precondition target distributions and enable jumps to distant regions. However, there is currently no systematic comparison of different normalizing flow architectures for MCMC. As such, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 David Nabergoj , Erik Štrumbelj

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) were developed to learn policies for efficiently sampling combinatorial candidates by interpreting their generative processes as trajectories in directed acyclic graphs. In the value-based training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Puhua Niu , Shili Wu , Xiaoning Qian

This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically used to model distributions over continuous spaces, and generative flow networks (GFlowNets), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Nikolay Malkin , Salem Lahlou , Tristan Deleu , Xu Ji , Edward Hu , Katie Everett , Dinghuai Zhang , Yoshua Bengio

In this contribution, we propose a new computationally efficient method to combine Variational Inference (VI) with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). This approach can be used with generic MCMC kernels, but is especially well suited to…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have not been broadly adopted in Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). This paper initially reviews the main challenges in sampling from the parameter posterior of a neural network via MCMC. Such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-05 Theodore Papamarkou , Jacob Hinkle , M. Todd Young , David Womble

The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Hao Wu , Jonas Köhler , Frank Noé

Due to limited resources and fast economic growth, designing optimal transportation road networks with traffic simulation and validation in a cost-effective manner is vital for developing countries, where extensive manual testing is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Zarif Ikram , Ling Pan , Dianbo Liu

We focus on generative autoencoders, such as variational or adversarial autoencoders, which jointly learn a generative model alongside an inference model. Generative autoencoders are those which are trained to softly enforce a prior on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-13 Antonia Creswell , Kai Arulkumaran , Anil Anthony Bharath

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn to sample states proportional to an unnormalized reward. Despite their theoretical promise, practical training is often unstable, exhibiting severe loss spikes and mode collapse. To tackle this, we…

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Ling Pan , Moksh Jain , Kanika Madan , Yoshua Bengio

We introduce a novel training principle for probabilistic models that is an alternative to maximum likelihood. The proposed Generative Stochastic Networks (GSN) framework is based on learning the transition operator of a Markov chain whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-29 Guillaume Alain , Yoshua Bengio , Li Yao , Jason Yosinski , Eric Thibodeau-Laufer , Saizheng Zhang , Pascal Vincent

Phylogenetics is a branch of computational biology that studies the evolutionary relationships among biological entities. Its long history and numerous applications notwithstanding, inference of phylogenetic trees from sequence data remains…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2024-03-26 Mingyang Zhou , Zichao Yan , Elliot Layne , Nikolay Malkin , Dinghuai Zhang , Moksh Jain , Mathieu Blanchette , Yoshua Bengio

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