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Francisco Vargas

14 accepted papers

2026

Accelerated Parallel Tempering via Neural Transports

ICLR 2026poster

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are essential tools in computational statistics for sampling from unnormalised probability distributions, but can be fragile when targeting high-dimensional, multimodal, or complex target distributions. Parallel Tempering (PT) enhances MCMC's sample efficie…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

CREPE: Controlling diffusion with REPlica Exchange

ICLR 2026poster

Inference-time control of diffusion models aims to steer model outputs to satisfy new constraints without retraining. Previous approaches have mostly relied on heuristic guidance or have been coupled with Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for bias correction. In this paper, we propose a flexible alternat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RNE: plug-and-play diffusion inference-time control and energy-based training

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion models generate data by removing noise gradually, which corresponds to the time-reversal of a noising process. However, access to only the denoising kernels is often insufficient. In many applications, we need the knowledge of the marginal densities along the generation trajectory, which e…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

FEAT: Free energy Estimators with Adaptive Transport

NeurIPS 2025poster

We present Free energy Estimators with Adaptive Transport (FEAT), a novel framework for free energy estimation---a critical challenge across scientific domains. FEAT leverages learned transports implemented via stochastic interpolants and provides consistent, minimum-variance estimators based on esc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Gradient Variance Reveals Failure Modes in Flow-Based Generative Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Rectified Flows learn ODE vector fields whose trajectories are straight between source and target distributions, enabling near one-step inference. We show that this straight-path objective reveals fundamental failure modes: under deterministic training, low gradient variance drives memorization of a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

NMA-tune: Generating Highly Designable and Dynamics Aware Protein Backbones

ICML 2025poster

Protein's backbone flexibility is a crucial property that heavily influences its functionality. Recent work in the field of protein diffusion probabilistic modelling has leveraged Normal Mode Analysis (NMA) and, for the first time, introduced information about large scale protein motion into the gen…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Beyond ELBOs: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Variational Methods for Sampling

ICML 2024poster

Monte Carlo methods, Variational Inference, and their combinations play a pivotal role in sampling from intractable probability distributions. However, current studies lack a unified evaluation framework, relying on disparate performance measures and limited method comparisons across diverse tasks,…

2024

DEFT: Efficient Fine-tuning of Diffusion Models by Learning the Generalised $h$-transform

NeurIPS 2024poster

Generative modelling paradigms based on denoising diffusion processes have emerged as a leading candidate for conditional sampling in inverse problems. In many real-world applications, we often have access to large, expensively trained unconditional diffusion models, which we aim to exploit for imp…

2024

Dynamics-Informed Protein Design with Structure Conditioning

ICLR 2024poster

Current protein generative models are able to design novel backbones with desired shapes or functional motifs. However, despite the importance of a protein’s dynamical properties for its function, conditioning on dynamical properties remains elusive. We present a new approach to protein generative m…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

To smooth a cloud or to pin it down: Expressiveness guarantees and insights on score matching in denoising diffusion models

UAI 2024poster

Denoising diffusion models are a class of generative models that have recently achieved state-of-the-art results across many domains. Gradual noise is added to the data using a diffusion process, which transforms the data distribution into a Gaussian. Samples from the generative model are then obtai…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Transport meets Variational Inference: Controlled Monte Carlo Diffusions

ICLR 2024poster

Connecting optimal transport and variational inference, we present a principled and systematic framework for sampling and generative modelling centred around divergences on path space. Our work culminates in the development of the Controlled Monte Carlo Diffusion sampler (CMCD) for Bayesian computat…