Flow Matching for Posterior Inference with Simulator Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Holzschuh, Benjamin, Thuerey, Nils
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Holzschuh, Benjamin
Thuerey, Nils
author_facet Holzschuh, Benjamin
Thuerey, Nils
contents Flow-based generative modeling is a powerful tool for solving inverse problems in physical sciences that can be used for sampling and likelihood evaluation with much lower inference times than traditional methods. We propose to refine flows with additional control signals based on a simulator. Control signals can include gradients and a problem-specific cost function if the simulator is differentiable, or they can be fully learned from the simulator output. In our proposed method, we pretrain the flow network and include feedback from the simulator exclusively for finetuning, therefore requiring only a small amount of additional parameters and compute. We motivate our design choices on several benchmark problems for simulation-based inference and evaluate flow matching with simulator feedback against classical MCMC methods for modeling strong gravitational lens systems, a challenging inverse problem in astronomy. We demonstrate that including feedback from the simulator improves the accuracy by $53\%$, making it competitive with traditional techniques while being up to $67$x faster for inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_22573
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flow Matching for Posterior Inference with Simulator Feedback
Holzschuh, Benjamin
Thuerey, Nils
Machine Learning
Flow-based generative modeling is a powerful tool for solving inverse problems in physical sciences that can be used for sampling and likelihood evaluation with much lower inference times than traditional methods. We propose to refine flows with additional control signals based on a simulator. Control signals can include gradients and a problem-specific cost function if the simulator is differentiable, or they can be fully learned from the simulator output. In our proposed method, we pretrain the flow network and include feedback from the simulator exclusively for finetuning, therefore requiring only a small amount of additional parameters and compute. We motivate our design choices on several benchmark problems for simulation-based inference and evaluate flow matching with simulator feedback against classical MCMC methods for modeling strong gravitational lens systems, a challenging inverse problem in astronomy. We demonstrate that including feedback from the simulator improves the accuracy by $53\%$, making it competitive with traditional techniques while being up to $67$x faster for inference.
title Flow Matching for Posterior Inference with Simulator Feedback
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22573