arXiv Machine Learning

Generative Modeling: A Review

The paper reviews generative modeling by categorizing generators into three types: those estimating counterfactual outcome distributions in causal inference, those recovering posteriors from simulated parameter–outcome pairs, and those forming predictive outcome distributions. It introduces generative Bayesian computation, a quantile neural network trained on simulated pairs using the pinball loss, which directly targets posterior distributions without requiring invertible architectures or density evaluation. The method is demonstrated on an agent-based Ebola transmission model, showing accurate posterior recovery at lower computational cost than rejection-based simulation inference.

arXiv AI
1d ago

BayesNDE: Bayesian Generative Modeling for Neural Density Estimation

BayesNDE is a neural density estimator that uses Bayesian generative modeling to estimate densities without relying on invertible networks or Jacobian-determinant calculations. It constructs an adaptive proposal for each observation by inferring a sample-specific latent posterior, and then applies bridge sampling to combine proposal samples with separate posterior samples for density estimation. Experiments on synthetic datasets show improved density estimation and structure recovery, while real-world applications demonstrate better anomaly detection.

By Chenglin Li, Qiao Liu
arXiv Statistics ML
Aug 28

On the approximation of posterior laws in compound loss models by conditional Wasserstein GANs

The paper introduces a conditional Wasserstein GAN to approximate posterior distributions in compound loss models, conditioning on sufficient statistics, prior mean, coefficient of variation, and mixture weights. A single generator can learn the posteriors for both Poisson intensity and Pareto shape parameters across Gamma, inverse‑Gaussian, and lognormal priors. The authors validate the approach with simulation‑based calibration, analytical comparisons, and extensive MCMC, and apply it to extreme natural catastrophe loss data to generate rolling one‑year posterior predictive distributions and assess tail risk under heavy‑tailed severity and prior uncertainty.

By Aleksandar Arandjelovic, Pavel V. Shevchenko, George Tzougas
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Generative AI for Validating Physics Laws

arXiv:2503.17894v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose generative learner for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects and characterizing the full distribution of causal effects. The...

By Maria Nareklishvili, Nicholas Polson, Vadim Sokolov
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Joint Bayesian Inference of Graphical Structure and Parameters with a Single Generative Flow Network

The paper introduces JSP-GFN, a Generative Flow Network that jointly infers the structure and parameters of a Bayesian Network. It sequentially generates a directed acyclic graph edge by edge and then samples the corresponding conditional probability parameters once the full structure is known. Experiments on simulated and real data show that JSP‑GFN accurately approximates the joint posterior and outperforms existing methods.

By Tristan Deleu, Mizu Nishikawa-Toomey, Jithendaraa Subramanian, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Laurent Charlin, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Distributional Causal Mediation via Conditional Generative Modeling

arXiv:2605. 01765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mediation analysis has traditionally focused on outcome-level summary contrasts, such as mean effects, which may obscure substantial distributional changes induced by complex and nonlinear causal mechanisms.

By Jinlun Zhang, Haoneng Huang, Zishu Zhan, Chunquan Ou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift

arXiv:2604. 04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced.

By Xiuyuan Cheng, Yunqin Zhu, Yao Xie
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Particle GFlowNets: Rethinking Generative Marginalization Models

The paper introduces Particle GFlowNets, showing that Generative Marginalization Models (MaMs) are equivalent to Generative Flow Networks. It extends MaMs to non‑autoregressive sampling and proposes an automatic full‑state rejuvenation criterion based on the Gelman‑Rubin statistic to accelerate learning. Experiments demonstrate significant training speedups in large combinatorial spaces.

By Tiago da Silva, Diego Mesquita, Salem Lahlou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Prequential posteriors

The paper introduces prequential posteriors, a Bayesian approach that uses a predictive‑sequential loss function to update deep generative forecasting models (DGFMs) when new data arrive. By adopting a consistency notion suitable for model misspecification, the authors prove that both the loss minimizer and the posterior concentrate on parameters with optimal predictive performance. Scalable inference is achieved with parallelisable waste‑free sequential Monte Carlo samplers that employ preconditioned gradient kernels, and the method is validated on synthetic and real meteorological time‑series data.

By Shreya Sinha-Roy, Richard G. Everitt, Christian P. Robert, Ritabrata Dutta