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Recently, continual learning has received a lot of attention. One of the significant problems is the occurrence of \emph{concept drift}, which consists of changing probabilistic characteristics of the incoming data. In the case of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Sebastián Basterrech , Michal Woźniak

This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Neng Wan , Dapeng Li , Naira Hovakimyan

Recently, a series of papers proposed deep learning-based approaches to sample from target distributions using controlled diffusion processes, being trained only on the unnormalized target densities without access to samples. Building on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Lorenz Richter , Julius Berner

Flow matching has emerged as a powerful generative framework, with recent few-step methods achieving remarkable inference acceleration. However, we identify a critical yet overlooked limitation: these models suffer from severe diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yexiong Lin , Jia Shi , Shanshan Ye , Wanyu Wang , Yu Yao , Tongliang Liu

Flow matching (FM) learns vector fields by regressing stochastic velocity targets along intermediate distributions $p_t$. We identify a geometric optimization bottleneck in this regression problem: when the covariance $\Sigma_t$ of $p_t$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Shadab Ahamed , Eshed Gal , Md Shahriar Rahim Siddiqui , Simon Ghyselincks , Moshe Eliasof , Eldad Haber

Recent work in unsupervised learning has focused on efficient inference and learning in latent variables models. Training these models by maximizing the evidence (marginal likelihood) is typically intractable. Thus, a common approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Linh Tran , Maja Pantic , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

Let $V_* : \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ be some (possibly non-convex) potential function, and consider the probability measure $\pi \propto e^{-V_*}$. When $\pi$ exhibits multiple modes, it is known that sampling techniques based on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-24 Carles Domingo-Enrich , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

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

Self-supervised representation learning is central to modern machine learning because it extracts structured latent features from unlabeled data and enables robust transfer across tasks and domains. However, it can suffer from…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-14 Louie Hong Yao , Yuhao Li , Shengchao Liu

Fitting neural networks often resorts to stochastic (or similar) gradient descent which is a noise-tolerant (and efficient) resolution of a gradient descent dynamics. It outputs a sequence of networks parameters, which sequence evolves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-15 Gabriel Turinici

Recent advances in deep learning have brought to the fore models that can make multiple computational steps in the service of completing a task; these are capable of describ- ing long-term dependencies in sequential data. Novel recurrent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-06 Kyriakos Tolias , Sotirios Chatzis

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

The support vector machine (SVM) and minimum Euclidean norm least squares regression are two fundamentally different approaches to fitting linear models, but they have recently been connected in models for very high-dimensional data through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Navid Ardeshir , Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu

Mode collapse is a significant unsolved issue of generative adversarial networks. In this work, we examine the causes of mode collapse from a novel perspective. Due to the nonuniform sampling in the training process, some sub-distributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Yanxiang Gong , Zhiwei Xie , Guozhen Duan , Zheng Ma , Mei Xie

Recent evidence has shown the existence of a so-called double-descent and even triple-descent behavior for the generalization error of deep-learning models. This important phenomenon commonly appears in implemented neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Antoine Bodin , Nicolas Macris

Recurrent Variational Autoencoder has been widely used for language modeling and text generation tasks. These models often face a difficult optimization problem, also known as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) term vanishing issue, where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-24 Prince Zizhuang Wang , William Yang Wang

Classical learning theory suggests that the optimal generalization performance of a machine learning model should occur at an intermediate model complexity, with simpler models exhibiting high bias and more complex models exhibiting high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-09 Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Sebastian W. Ober

Learning to sample from intractable distributions over discrete sets without relying on corresponding training data is a central problem in a wide range of fields, including Combinatorial Optimization. Currently, popular deep learning-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Sebastian Sanokowski , Sepp Hochreiter , Sebastian Lehner