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Collaborating Authors

 Lienen, Marten


Generative Modeling with Bayesian Sample Inference

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We derive a novel generative model from the simple act of Gaussian posterior inference. Treating the generated sample as an unknown variable to infer lets us formulate the sampling process in the language of Bayesian probability. Our model uses a sequence of prediction and posterior update steps to narrow down the unknown sample from a broad initial belief. In addition to a rigorous theoretical analysis, we establish a connection between our model and diffusion models and show that it includes Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs) as a special case. In our experiments, we demonstrate improved performance over both BFNs and Variational Diffusion Models, achieving competitive likelihood scores on CIFAR10 and ImageNet.


Flow Matching with Gaussian Process Priors for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recent advancements in generative modeling, particularly diffusion models, have opened new directions for time series modeling, achieving state-of-the-art performance in forecasting and synthesis. However, the reliance of diffusion-based models on a simple, fixed prior complicates the generative process since the data and prior distributions differ significantly. We introduce TSFlow, a conditional flow matching (CFM) model for time series that simplifies the generative problem by combining Gaussian processes, optimal transport paths, and data-dependent prior distributions. By incorporating (conditional) Gaussian processes, TSFlow aligns the prior distribution more closely with the temporal structure of the data, enhancing both unconditional and conditional generation. Furthermore, we propose conditional prior sampling to enable probabilistic forecasting with an unconditionally trained model. In our experimental evaluation on eight real-world datasets, we demonstrate the generative capabilities of TSFlow, producing high-quality unconditional samples. Finally, we show that both conditionally and unconditionally trained models achieve competitive results in forecasting benchmarks, surpassing other methods on 6 out of 8 datasets. However, these models typically transform non-i.i.d. This can hinder the generative process and potentially limit the models' performance.


Add and Thin: Diffusion for Temporal Point Processes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Autoregressive neural networks within the temporal point process (TPP) framework have become the standard for modeling continuous-time event data. Even though these models can expressively capture event sequences in a one-step-ahead fashion, they are inherently limited for long-term forecasting applications due to the accumulation of errors caused by their sequential nature. To overcome these limitations, we derive ADD-THIN, a principled probabilistic denoising diffusion model for TPPs that operates on entire event sequences. Unlike existing diffusion approaches, ADD-THIN naturally handles data with discrete and continuous components. In experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, our model matches the state-of-the-art TPP models in density estimation and strongly outperforms them in forecasting.


Assessing Robustness via Score-Based Adversarial Image Generation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Most adversarial attacks and defenses focus on perturbations within small $\ell_p$-norm constraints. However, $\ell_p$ threat models cannot capture all relevant semantic-preserving perturbations, and hence, the scope of robustness evaluations is limited. In this work, we introduce Score-Based Adversarial Generation (ScoreAG), a novel framework that leverages the advancements in score-based generative models to generate adversarial examples beyond $\ell_p$-norm constraints, so-called unrestricted adversarial examples, overcoming their limitations. Unlike traditional methods, ScoreAG maintains the core semantics of images while generating realistic adversarial examples, either by transforming existing images or synthesizing new ones entirely from scratch. We further exploit the generative capability of ScoreAG to purify images, empirically enhancing the robustness of classifiers. Our extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that ScoreAG matches the performance of state-of-the-art attacks and defenses across multiple benchmarks. This work highlights the importance of investigating adversarial examples bounded by semantics rather than $\ell_p$-norm constraints. ScoreAG represents an important step towards more encompassing robustness assessments.


torchode: A Parallel ODE Solver for PyTorch

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce an ODE solver for the PyTorch ecosystem that can solve multiple ODEs in parallel independently from each other while achieving significant performance gains. Our implementation tracks each ODE's progress separately and is carefully optimized for GPUs and compatibility with PyTorch's JIT compiler. Its design lets researchers easily augment any aspect of the solver and collect and analyze internal solver statistics. In our experiments, our implementation is up to 4.3 times faster per step than other ODE solvers and it is robust against within-batch interactions that lead other solvers to take up to 4 times as many steps. Code available at https://github.com/martenlienen/torchode


Scalable Optimal Transport in High Dimensions for Graph Distances, Embedding Alignment, and More

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The current best practice for computing optimal transport (OT) is via entropy regularization and Sinkhorn iterations. This algorithm runs in quadratic time as it requires the full pairwise cost matrix, which is prohibitively expensive for large sets of objects. In this work we propose two effective log-linear time approximations of the cost matrix: First, a sparse approximation based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) and, second, a Nystr\"om approximation with LSH-based sparse corrections, which we call locally corrected Nystr\"om (LCN). These approximations enable general log-linear time algorithms for entropy-regularized OT that perform well even for the complex, high-dimensional spaces common in deep learning. We analyse these approximations theoretically and evaluate them experimentally both directly and end-to-end as a component for real-world applications. Using our approximations for unsupervised word embedding alignment enables us to speed up a state-of-the-art method by a factor of 3 while also improving the accuracy by 3.1 percentage points without any additional model changes. For graph distance regression we propose the graph transport network (GTN), which combines graph neural networks (GNNs) with enhanced Sinkhorn. GTN outcompetes previous models by 48% and still scales log-linearly in the number of nodes.