The article surveys recent progress in tractable probabilistic generative modeling, with a focus on Probabilistic Circuits (PCs). It offers a unified view of the trade‑offs between expressivity and tractability, outlining design principles, algorithmic extensions, and a taxonomy of the field. The review also covers deep and hybrid PCs that integrate ideas from deep neural models, and highlights challenges and open questions for future research.
Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are generative models that support exact inference and, unlike deep neural networks, admit an exact and tractable measure of loss-surface curvature: the trace of the Hessian of the log-likelihood. Recent work regularizes this trace globally to bias learning toward flatter, better generalizing optima.
arXiv:2603. 11946v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Probabilistic circuits (PCs) enable exact and tractable inference but employ data independent mixture weights that limit their ability to capture local geometry of the data manifold.
arXiv:2608. 12869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are generative models that support exact inference and, unlike deep neural networks, admit an exact and tractable measure of loss-surface curvature: the trace of the Hessian of the log-likelihood.
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.
arXiv:2607. 19126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Markov Logic Networks (NMLNs) are a flexible neurosymbolic relational model.
arXiv:2608. 16565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This cumulative habilitation thesis studies probabilistic circuits (PCs) as a powerful and tractable framework for reasoning and learning under uncertainty in artificial intelligence (AI).
arXiv:2603. 14161v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many disciplines need quantitative models that synthesize experimental data across multiple instances of the same general system.
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...
arXiv:2607. 18755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-based models have established state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling across domains, but are hard to interpret due to their complex latent embeddings.
arXiv:2603. 23016v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tabular data is more challenging to generate than text and images, due to its heterogeneous features and much lower sample sizes.
arXiv:2607. 27372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deep learning revolution, kicked off by AlexNet, taught us that end-to-end training beats decomposing a problem into hand-designed stages.
arXiv:2607. 27723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engression (Shen and Meinshausen, 2024) learns a conditional distribution by fitting a generative model $Y = f(X,\varepsilon)$ under the energy score, a strictly proper scoring rule.