提出高效离散扩散采样方法,解决内存瓶颈并实现无偏采样。
Scalable Discrete Diffusion Samplers: Combinatorial Optimization and Statistical Physics
- 基于策略梯度与自归一化重要性采样,实现低内存训练
- 在组合优化任务上达到当前最优性能,超越自回归模型
- 首次实现离散扩散模型的无偏采样,适用于科学计算场景
在统计物理、变分推断和组合优化中,从复杂非归一化分布中采样成为重要研究方向。近期工作展示了扩散模型在此领域的潜力,但现有方法受限于内存扩展性,难以进行大量扩散步骤,因其需对整个生成过程反向传播。为此,本文提出两种新型离散扩散采样器训练方法:一种基于策略梯度定理,另一种采用自归一化神经重要性采样(SN-NIS)。这两种方法实现了内存高效的训练,并在无监督组合优化中取得当前最佳结果。许多科学应用还需无偏采样能力,本文进一步改进SN-NIS与神经马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛方法,首次使离散扩散模型可用于此类问题。在Ising模型基准测试中,本方法优于主流自回归模型。该工作为离散领域中的科学应用开辟新路径,突破了以往仅限于精确似然模型的限制。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions over discrete domains emerged as a promising research direction with applications in statistical physics, variational inference, and combinatorial optimization. Recent work has demonstrated the potential of diffusion models in this domain. However, existing methods face limitations in memory scaling and thus the number of attainable diffusion steps since they require backpropagation through the entire generative process. To overcome these limitations we introduce two novel training methods for discrete diffusion samplers, one grounded in the policy gradient theorem and the other one leveraging Self-Normalized Neural Importance Sampling (SN-NIS). These methods yield memory-efficient training and achieve state-of-the-art results in unsupervised combinatorial optimization. Numerous scientific applications additionally require the ability of unbiased sampling. We introduce adaptations of SN-NIS and Neural Markov Chain Monte Carlo that enable for the first time the application of discrete diffusion models to this problem. We validate our methods on Ising model benchmarks and find that they outperform popular autoregressive approaches. Our work opens new avenues for applying diffusion models to a wide range of scientific applications in discrete domains that were hitherto restricted to exact likelihood models.
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