arXiv:2509.26221cs.LG2025-09

提出一种高效精确的密度估计框架,解决训练慢、推断慢、近似似然等问题。

Marginal Flow: a flexible and efficient framework for density estimation

  • 通过边缘化隐变量采样构建模型,避免直接优化复杂参数
  • 支持精确密度评估,训练与推理速度远超现有方法
  • 灵活适配任意网络结构,适合多模态分布和低维流形学习

当前密度建模方法普遍存在训练成本高、推断慢、似然近似、模式崩溃或架构限制(如双射映射)等问题。本文提出一种简单而强大的新框架——边际流(Marginal Flow),通过参数化分布 $q(x|w)$ 和可学习的隐变量分布 $q_θ(w)$ 构建模型 $q_θ(x)$。不直接优化隐变量 $w$,而是通过从 $q_θ(w)$ 中采样实现对 $w$ 的边缘化,因此得名。评估或采样 $q_θ(x)$ 仅需从 $q_θ(w)$ 中采样,极大提升效率。该模型支持精确密度计算,且在训练和推理上均比现有模型快数个数量级。边际流具有高度灵活性:不限制神经网络架构,可学习低维流形上的分布(已知或待学),可使用任意目标函数(如前向与反向KL散度)训练,并能轻松处理多模态目标。我们在多种任务上进行了广泛评估,包括合成数据集、基于模拟的推断、正定矩阵上的分布建模,以及图像潜在空间中的流形学习。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Current density modeling approaches suffer from at least one of the following shortcomings: expensive training, slow inference, approximate likelihood, mode collapse or architectural constraints like bijective mappings. We propose a simple yet powerful framework that overcomes these limitations altogether. We define our model $q_θ(x)$ through a parametric distribution $q(x|w)$ with latent parameters $w$. Instead of directly optimizing the latent variables $w$, our idea is to marginalize them out by sampling $w$ from a learnable distribution $q_θ(w)$, hence the name Marginal Flow. In order to evaluate the learned density $q_θ(x)$ or to sample from it, we only need to draw samples from $q_θ(w)$, which makes both operations efficient. The proposed model allows for exact density evaluation and is orders of magnitude faster than competing models both at training and inference. Furthermore, Marginal Flow is a flexible framework: it does not impose any restrictions on the neural network architecture, it enables learning distributions on lower-dimensional manifolds (either known or to be learned), it can be trained efficiently with any objective (e.g. forward and reverse KL divergence), and it easily handles multi-modal targets. We evaluate Marginal Flow extensively on various tasks including synthetic datasets, simulation-based inference, distributions on positive definite matrices and manifold learning in latent spaces of images.

密度估计边际流生成模型高效推断

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。