arXiv Machine Learning

Variational Inference via Entropic Transport Descent

arXiv:2606. 25265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods approximate an intractable target distribution by evolving an ensemble of interacting samples.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Distribution-Conditioned Transport

The paper introduces Distribution‑Conditioned Transport (DCT), a framework that learns transport maps conditioned on embeddings of source and target distributions, allowing generalization to unseen distribution pairs. DCT supports semi‑supervised learning for distributional forecasting by leveraging distributions observed at only one condition. It is agnostic to the transport mechanism and is demonstrated on synthetic benchmarks and four biological applications, including batch effect transfer in single‑cell genomics and modeling T‑cell receptor sequence evolution.

By Nic Fishman, Gokul Gowri, Paolo L. B. Fischer, Marinka Zitnik, Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Probability-Flow Distillation: Distribution Matching in Parameter Space

The paper introduces Probability‑Flow Distillation (PFD), a new method for matching parameter distributions in diffusion‑based models. It extends the particle variational inference framework of Variational Score Distillation to Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and Score Distillation via Inversion (SDI), revealing that SDS focuses on mode collapse while SDI converges to a contracted distribution. By replacing a single Euler step in SDI with a full reverse probability‑flow ODE solve and simplifying the gradient, PFD achieves distribution matching with only a forward ODE solve, and experiments on synthetic data, CelebA, and text‑to‑3D tasks confirm its effectiveness.

By Rohith Ramanan, A. N. Rajagopalan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Beyond Random Couplings: Contrastive Noise Alignment in Generative Flows

The paper introduces Contrastive Noise Alignment (CNA), a training-time method for generative flow models that dynamically aligns Gaussian noise with data samples using a cross-modal InfoNCE objective. By modeling noise as an interacting particle system and regularizing with angular entropy and radial norm penalties, CNA reduces arbitrary data-noise couplings and flow curvature. Empirical results show that CNA improves generation quality, lowering FID by over 50% for few-step pixel-space generation compared to standard rectified flow and outperforming optimal transport baselines by at least 24%.

By Lennart Wittke, Vinicius Azevedo
arXiv AI
2d ago

Discrete Wasserstein Flows for One-Step Generative Modeling

The paper presents a new one‑step generative modeling framework for finite state spaces, leveraging discrete Wasserstein geometry to define a target‑relative KL gradient flow over a reversible Markov kernel. The authors implement this flow at the particle level using Markov jumps and encode the resulting transport updates into a latent‑conditioned generator, enabling one‑step inference after training. Experiments on a controlled setting confirm KL dissipation, consistency between particle dynamics and probability flow, and accurate numerical scaling, while a finite‑capacity neural generator successfully tracks the exact transport targets.

By Alessandro Micheli, Andrea Zerio, Samir Bhatt
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Fine-Tuning Generative Models for Extreme Events via CVaR-Penalized Wasserstein Gradient Flows

arXiv:2608. 11544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose CVaR-penalized Generative Particle Algorithm (CVaR-GPA), a robust, tail-agnostic algorithm for fine-tuning generative models to learn heavy-tailed distributions and capture extreme events, requiring no prior knowledge or estimation of the target's tail characteristics.

By Thejani Gamage, Hyemin Gu, Zhizhen Zhang, Ziyu Chen, Markos Katsoulakis, Luc Rey-Bellet
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

GFlowNets and variational inference

arXiv:2210.00580v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically used to m...

By Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Salem Lahlou, Tristan Deleu, Xu Ji, Edward Hu, Katie Everett, Dinghuai Zhang, Yoshua Bengio