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Conditional flow matching for physics-constrained inverse problems with finite training data

Dasgupta, Agnimitra, Fardisi, Ali, Aminy, Mehrnegar, Binder, Brianna, Shaddy, Bryan, Moazami, Saeed, Oberai, Assad

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This study presents a conditional flow matching framework for solving physics-constrained Bayesian inverse problems. In this setting, samples from the joint distribution of inferred variables and measurements are assumed available, while explicit evaluation of the prior and likelihood densities is not required. We derive a simple and self-contained formulation of both the unconditional and conditional flow matching algorithms, tailored specifically to inverse problems. In the conditional setting, a neural network is trained to learn the velocity field of a probability flow ordinary differential equation that transports samples from a chosen source distribution directly to the posterior distribution conditioned on observed measurements. This black-box formulation accommodates nonlinear, high-dimensional, and potentially non-differentiable forward models without restrictive assumptions on the noise model. We further analyze the behavior of the learned velocity field in the regime of finite training data. Under mild architectural assumptions, we show that overtraining can induce degenerate behavior in the generated conditional distributions, including variance collapse and a phenomenon termed selective memorization, wherein generated samples concentrate around training data points associated with similar observations. A simplified theoretical analysis explains this behavior, and numerical experiments confirm it in practice. We demonstrate that standard early-stopping criteria based on monitoring test loss effectively mitigate such degeneracy. The proposed method is evaluated on several physics-based inverse problems. We investigate the impact of different choices of source distributions, including Gaussian and data-informed priors. Across these examples, conditional flow matching accurately captures complex, multimodal posterior distributions while maintaining computational efficiency.


PDGMM-VAE: A Variational Autoencoder with Adaptive Per-Dimension Gaussian Mixture Model Priors for Nonlinear ICA

Wei, Yuan-Hao, Sun, Yan-Jie

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Independent component analysis is a core framework within blind source separation for recovering latent source signals from observed mixtures under statistical independence assumptions. In this work, we propose PDGMM-VAE, a source-oriented variational autoencoder in which each latent dimension, interpreted explicitly as an individual source signal, is assigned its own Gaussian mixture model prior. Unlike conventional VAE formulations with a shared simple prior, the proposed framework imposes per-dimension heterogeneous prior constraints, enabling the model to capture diverse non-Gaussian source statistics and thereby promote source separation under a probabilistic encoder-decoder architecture. Importantly, the parameters of these per-dimension GMM priors are not fixed in advance, but are adaptively learned and automatically refined toward convergence together with the encoder and decoder parameters under the overall training objective. Within this formulation, the encoder serves as a demixing mapping from observations to latent sources, while the decoder reconstructs the observed mixtures from the inferred components. The proposed model provides a systematic study of an idea that had previously only been noted in our preliminary form, namely, equipping different latent sources with different GMM priors for ICA, and formulates it as a full VAE framework with end-to-end training and per-dimension prior learning. Experimental results on both linear and nonlinear mixing problems demonstrate that PDGMM-VAE can recover latent source signals and achieve satisfactory separation performance.




Sourcerer: Sample-based Maximum Entropy Source Distribution Estimation Julius V etter,1,2, Guy Moss

Neural Information Processing Systems

Scientific modeling applications often require estimating a distribution of parameters consistent with a dataset of observations--an inference task also known as source distribution estimation. This problem can be ill-posed, however, since many different source distributions might produce the same distribution of data-consistent simulations. To make a principled choice among many equally valid sources, we propose an approach which targets the maximum entropy distribution, i.e., prioritizes retaining as much uncertainty as possible.


LaSCal: Label-ShiftCalibrationwithouttargetlabels

Neural Information Processing Systems

Calibration error (CE) provides insights into the alignment between the predicted confidence scores and the classifier accuracy.