Flow Sampling: Learning to Sample from Unnormalized Densities via Denoising Conditional Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Havens, Aaron, Karrer, Brian, Shaul, Neta
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Havens, Aaron
Karrer, Brian
Shaul, Neta
author_facet Havens, Aaron
Karrer, Brian
Shaul, Neta
contents Sampling from unnormalized densities is analogous to the generative modeling problem, but the target distribution is defined by a known energy function instead of data samples. Because evaluating the energy function is often costly, a primary challenge is to learn an efficient sampler. We introduce Flow Sampling, a framework built on diffusion models and flow matching for the data-free setting. Our training objective is conditioned on a noise sample and regresses onto a denoising diffusion drift constructed from the energy function. In contrast, diffusion models' objective is conditioned on a data sample and regresses onto a noising diffusion drift. We utilize the interpolant process to minimize the number of energy function evaluations during training, resulting in an efficient and scalable method for sampling unnormalized densities. Furthermore, our formulation naturally extends to Riemannian manifolds, enabling diffusion-based sampling in geometries beyond Euclidean space. We derive a closed-form formula for the conditional drift on constant curvature manifolds, including hyperspheres and hyperbolic spaces. We evaluate Flow Sampling on synthetic energy benchmarks, small peptides, large-scale amortized molecular conformer generation, and distributions supported on the sphere, demonstrating strong empirical performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_03984
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flow Sampling: Learning to Sample from Unnormalized Densities via Denoising Conditional Processes
Havens, Aaron
Karrer, Brian
Shaul, Neta
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Sampling from unnormalized densities is analogous to the generative modeling problem, but the target distribution is defined by a known energy function instead of data samples. Because evaluating the energy function is often costly, a primary challenge is to learn an efficient sampler. We introduce Flow Sampling, a framework built on diffusion models and flow matching for the data-free setting. Our training objective is conditioned on a noise sample and regresses onto a denoising diffusion drift constructed from the energy function. In contrast, diffusion models' objective is conditioned on a data sample and regresses onto a noising diffusion drift. We utilize the interpolant process to minimize the number of energy function evaluations during training, resulting in an efficient and scalable method for sampling unnormalized densities. Furthermore, our formulation naturally extends to Riemannian manifolds, enabling diffusion-based sampling in geometries beyond Euclidean space. We derive a closed-form formula for the conditional drift on constant curvature manifolds, including hyperspheres and hyperbolic spaces. We evaluate Flow Sampling on synthetic energy benchmarks, small peptides, large-scale amortized molecular conformer generation, and distributions supported on the sphere, demonstrating strong empirical performance.
title Flow Sampling: Learning to Sample from Unnormalized Densities via Denoising Conditional Processes
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03984