7 accepted papers
We derive a controlled generation objective within the framework of Variational Flow Matching (VFM), which casts flow matching as a variational inference problem. We demonstrate that controlled generation can be implemented two ways: (1) by way of end-to-end training of conditional generative models…
We present variational inference with sequential sample-average approximations (VISA), a method for approximate inference in computationally intensive models, such as those based on numerical simulations. VISA extends importance-weighted forward-KL variational inference by employing a sequence of sa…
Incorporating geometric inductive biases into models can aid interpretability and generalization, but encoding to a specific geometric structure can be challenging due to the imposed topological constraints. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically characterize obstructions to training encode…
We develop operators for construction of proposals in probabilistic programs, which we refer to as inference combinators. Inference combinators define a grammar over importance samplers that compose primitive operations such as application of a transition kernel and importance resampling. Proposals…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used importance sampling strategies and provides a mechanism for learn…
We develop amortized population Gibbs (APG) samplers, a class of scalable methods that frame structured variational inference as adaptive importance sampling. APG samplers construct high-dimensional proposals by iterating over updates to lower-dimensional blocks of variables. We train each condition…
Modeling biomechanical musculoskeletal systems reveals that the mapping from muscle stimulations to movement dynamics is highly nonlinear and complex, which makes it difficult to control those systems with classical techniques. In this work, we not only investigate whether machine learning approache…