The paper investigates training diffusion models to sample from distributions defined by unnormalized densities or energy functions. It benchmarks various diffusion-structured inference techniques, including simulation-based variational methods and off-policy approaches such as continuous generative flow networks, highlighting their relative strengths and challenging some prior claims. Additionally, the authors introduce a new exploration strategy for off-policy methods that employs local search in the target space with a replay buffer, demonstrating improved sample quality across multiple target distributions.
By Marcin Sendera, Minsu Kim, Sarthak Mittal, Pablo Lemos, Luca Scimeca, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Alexandre Adam, Yoshua Bengio, Esmeralda S. Whitammer
arXiv:2504. 01894v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a bifidelity method for uncertainty quantification of parameter estimates in complex systems, leveraging generative models trained to sample the target conditional distribution.
By Caroline Tatsuoka, Minglei Yang, Dongbin Xiu, Guannan Zhang
arXiv:2502. 04646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weighted sampling -- sampling from a probability density function (PDF) proportional to the product of a base PDF and a weight function -- is a fundamental technique with wide-ranging applications in variance reduction, biased sampling, data augmentation, and more.
By Heasung Kim, Taekyun Lee, Hyeji Kim, Gustavo de Veciana
arXiv:2608. 08644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of sampling compositional and discrete objects from a given unnormalized posterior distribution.
By Tiago da Silva, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Salem Lahlou
The paper introduces block‑triangular joint drifting, a method that applies a projected drift field to the joint distribution of consecutive states, enabling one‑step generative surrogate models for stochastic transition dynamics. This architecture preserves the current‑state marginal while directly sampling the conditional distribution of next states, allowing stochastic trajectories to be generated with a single model evaluation per time step. Experiments show that the approach achieves accurate marginal and trajectory‑dependent statistics with favorable accuracy‑cost tradeoffs compared to deterministic, diffusion, flow, and distillation‑based generative surrogates.
By Nicholas Geissler, Shreya Jha, Ricardo Baptista, Benjamin Peherstorfer
We consider the problem of sampling compositional and discrete objects from a given unnormalized posterior distribution. Notably, recent studies have shown that this problem can be efficiently solved by learning a deterministic Markov Decision Process (MDP) that progressively builds each object in proportion to the posterior.