Particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods approximate an intractable target distribution by evolving an ensemble of interacting samples. Existing approaches rely predominantly on kernel-based repulsion (e.
arXiv:2609.37227v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pretrained diffusion and flow-based models to new tasks, e.g., to generate samples from a conditional distribution or sa...
By Adhithyan Kalaivanan, Zheng Zhao, Jens Sj\"olund, Fredrik Lindsten
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
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:2607. 05252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is critical for scientific discovery, with generative models offering a promising path toward efficient inference.
By Weichen Qin, Yufan Xie, Peihao Wang, Chia-Jui Chou, Minghui Du, Peng Xu, Ziren Luo, Yi Yang, Jingyi Yu, Bo Liang, Jiakai Zhang
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:2601. 21026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sampling configurations at thermodynamic equilibrium is a central challenge in statistical physics.
By Louis Grenioux, Maxence Noble
arXiv:2607. 07519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We address the problem of efficiently sampling multimodal probability distributions, where standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods often suffer from poor mixing and mode trapping.
By Ricardo Baptista, Olivier Zahm
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:2607. 01012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data assimilation models state dynamics conditioned on sequential observations, and has wide-ranging scientific applications.
By Chandni Nagda, Mayank Shrivastavam Gudrun Thorkelsdottir, Gan Zhang, Morteza Mardani, Arindam Banerjee
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: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