arXiv Machine Learning

Towards Understanding the Training of GFlowNets: A Theoretical Perspective

The paper presents a theoretical framework linking balance objectives in Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to sampling accuracy. It establishes bounds on terminal symmetric KL divergence in terms of expected balance loss and shows how approximate stationarity controls distribution error, accounting for parameterization incompleteness. The authors prove finite‑time convergence rates under various sampling and backward‑policy regimes, clarifying the roles of coverage, parameterization, and moving components in GFlowNet training.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 6

Stable GFlowNets with TV Monitoring and Probabilistic Guarantees

arXiv:2605. 01729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn to sample states proportional to an unnormalized reward.

By Zengxiang Lei, Ananth Shreekumar, Jonathan Rosenthal, Ruoyu Song, Alvaro A. Cardenas, Daniel J. Fremont, Dongyan Xu, Satish Ukkusuri, Z. Berkay Celik
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Universality and Convergence of Generative Flows

The paper studies generative flows that sample from an unnormalized target by training a flow to satisfy a balance condition. It shows that the training loss can certify sampler accuracy, can be driven to zero, and quantifies how fast gradient descent converges, with explicit bounds depending on the backward policy and graph structure. The authors provide theoretical guarantees, test them on finite graphs, and certify each theorem using a Lean 4 development.

By Leo Brunswic
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Trajectory balance: Improved credit assignment in GFlowNets

The paper introduces a new learning objective called trajectory balance for Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), aiming to improve credit assignment across long action sequences. It demonstrates that minimizing this objective yields a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution. Experiments on four domains show that trajectory balance enhances convergence, sample diversity, and robustness to long sequences and large action spaces.

By Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio, Chen Sun, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Information-Geometric Forward Policy Training in GFlowNets

arXiv:2608. 03967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have emerged as a flexible framework for amortised inference over discrete and mixed discrete-continuous objects, requiring only an unnormalised target density specified through a reward.

By Yordan Raykov, Rodrigo Veiga
arXiv AI
6d ago

Learning a Mixture of GFlowNets

arXiv:2610.07562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning an ensemble of GFlowNets to sample from a discrete target distribution has become a common approach for achieving better state space explora...

By Tiago da Silva, Amauri H. Souza, Salem Lahlou
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Prediction--Loss Alignment for Sampler--Robust Flow Matching Training

The paper examines the common practice in diffusion and flow matching of predicting the clean signal, converting it to a velocity, and training with a velocity-space loss. It shows that this conversion can cause unstable optimization due to singular endpoint amplification, but that prediction–loss alignment removes this source of non‑integrability and ensures a finite second moment for all timesteps, even with uniform sampling. Experiments confirm that aligned objectives remain trainable across different samplers, reconciling theoretical concerns with empirical success.

By Jiadong Hong, Lei Liu, Xinyu Bian, Wenjie Wang, Zhaoyang Zhang