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.
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: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: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...
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.
arXiv:2601. 21026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sampling configurations at thermodynamic equilibrium is a central challenge in statistical physics.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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. To mitigate these issues, we propose Gradient-free Riemannian Langevin Sampler (GRiLS), a novel proposal that improves exploration without requiring gradient evaluations of the target density.
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.
arXiv:2606. 02453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the remarkable fidelity of generative models, they frequently suffer from mode collapse.
arXiv:2606. 29110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in flow-based generative modeling has led to models that output high-quality samples while using only a small number of function evaluations.