HackerPapers

arXiv:2202.01361cs.LG

Generative Flow Networks for Discrete Probabilistic Modeling

Dinghuai Zhang, Nikolay Malkin, Zhen Liu, Alexandra Volokhova, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio

Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.

Abstract

We present energy-based generative flow networks (EB-GFN), a novel probabilistic modeling algorithm for high-dimensional discrete data. Building upon the theory of generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we model the generation process by a stochastic data construction policy and thus amortize expensive MCMC exploration into a fixed number of actions sampled from a GFlowNet. We show how GFlowNets can approximately perform large-block Gibbs sampling to mix between modes. We propose a framework to jointly train a GFlowNet with an energy function, so that the GFlowNet learns to sample from the energy distribution, while the energy learns with an approximate MLE objective with negative samples from the GFlowNet. We demonstrate EB-GFN's effectiveness on various probabilistic modeling tasks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zdhNarsil/EB_GFN.

arXiv comments
Accepted by ICML 2022
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning stat.MLMachine Learning (Statistics)

On Hacker News

Linked by 1 identifiable commenter in 1 comment across 1 thread, from Mar 2022 to Mar 2022.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments1 thread

  1. Generative Flow Networks 1 comment
    • Yes, although they may not be ideal unless you're able to define a "distance" between a proof that the agent is proposing and whether that proof is correct (i.e. unless you're able to define a reward or energy function). It may be possible to infer/learn a score from existing…

      manuxView on HNParent context

Submitted to Hacker News

Connected through shared HN threads, not inferred similarity or a recommendation.