arXiv Machine Learning By Vincent Pacelli, Akash Ratheesh, Evangelos Theodorou

Variational Inference via Entropic Transport Descent

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Distribution-Conditioned Transport

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Probability-Flow Distillation: Distribution Matching in Parameter Space

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 Machine Learning
Sep 17

Beyond Random Couplings: Contrastive Noise Alignment in Generative Flows

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