Neural Bridge Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Jian, Liu, Yican, Zeng, Delu, Paisley, John, Zhao, Qibin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Jian
Liu, Yican
Zeng, Delu
Paisley, John
Zhao, Qibin
author_facet Xu, Jian
Liu, Yican
Zeng, Delu
Paisley, John
Zhao, Qibin
contents Learning stochastic functions from partially observed context-target pairs requires models that are expressive, uncertainty-aware, and strongly conditioned on inputs. Neural Diffusion Processes (NDPs) improve expressivity with denoising diffusion, but their forward process is input-independent; inputs only enter the reverse denoiser, so the noisy training states themselves do not encode the conditioning inputs. We propose Neural Bridge Processes (NBPs), which replace the unconditional forward kernel with an input-anchored bridge trajectory. When input and output dimensions differ, NBP learns an output-space anchor $a_ψ(x)=P_ψ(x)$, allowing coordinates or other inputs to guide the generative path without changing the denoising backbone. We show theoretically that process-level anchoring induces pathwise input distinguishability, injects information about x into noisy states, and creates a direct gradient pathway unavailable to NDPs. Experiments on synthetic regression, EEG, CylinderFlow, and image regression show consistent improvements. Additional ablations show that the gains come from the full bridge construction with learned alignment, and that the same input-anchored path principle transfers to Flow Matching Neural Processes. These results suggest that bridge-anchored generative paths provide a general mechanism for strengthening conditional stochastic function modeling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Bridge Processes
Xu, Jian
Liu, Yican
Zeng, Delu
Paisley, John
Zhao, Qibin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Learning stochastic functions from partially observed context-target pairs requires models that are expressive, uncertainty-aware, and strongly conditioned on inputs. Neural Diffusion Processes (NDPs) improve expressivity with denoising diffusion, but their forward process is input-independent; inputs only enter the reverse denoiser, so the noisy training states themselves do not encode the conditioning inputs. We propose Neural Bridge Processes (NBPs), which replace the unconditional forward kernel with an input-anchored bridge trajectory. When input and output dimensions differ, NBP learns an output-space anchor $a_ψ(x)=P_ψ(x)$, allowing coordinates or other inputs to guide the generative path without changing the denoising backbone. We show theoretically that process-level anchoring induces pathwise input distinguishability, injects information about x into noisy states, and creates a direct gradient pathway unavailable to NDPs. Experiments on synthetic regression, EEG, CylinderFlow, and image regression show consistent improvements. Additional ablations show that the gains come from the full bridge construction with learned alignment, and that the same input-anchored path principle transfers to Flow Matching Neural Processes. These results suggest that bridge-anchored generative paths provide a general mechanism for strengthening conditional stochastic function modeling.
title Neural Bridge Processes
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07220