arXiv Machine Learning

How I learned to stop worrying and love StopGrads: Stationarity, Convergence, and a case study on Flow Map Learning

arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

On the Stability and Convergence of Flow Map Training

The paper investigates the training dynamics of flow map models, which convert diffusion trajectories into one‑step samplers for efficient probabilistic generation. It provides a theoretical analysis of the functional gradient flow induced by MeanFlow and Lagrangian losses, proving their convergence to the true flow map and identifying the risk of unbounded updates. The authors show that adaptive normalization and a specific reweighting scheme not only bound updates but also guarantee convergence to a neighborhood of the solution, and they confirm these findings with synthetic experiments and image‑generation benchmarks.

By Ishan Nath, Tom Stanic, Avishek Joey Bose, Gauthier Gidel, Quentin Bertrand
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Retry Policy Gradients in Continuous Action Spaces

arXiv:2606. 05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses.

By Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Towards Understanding the Training of GFlowNets: A Theoretical Perspective

The paper presents a theoretical framework linking balance objectives in Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to sampling accuracy. It establishes bounds on terminal symmetric KL divergence in terms of expected balance loss and shows how approximate stationarity controls distribution error, accounting for parameterization incompleteness. The authors prove finite‑time convergence rates under various sampling and backward‑policy regimes, clarifying the roles of coverage, parameterization, and moving components in GFlowNet training.

By Rui Hu, Yu Chen, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 6

Stable GFlowNets with TV Monitoring and Probabilistic Guarantees

arXiv:2605. 01729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn to sample states proportional to an unnormalized reward.

By Zengxiang Lei, Ananth Shreekumar, Jonathan Rosenthal, Ruoyu Song, Alvaro A. Cardenas, Daniel J. Fremont, Dongyan Xu, Satish Ukkusuri, Z. Berkay Celik