Papers for

data scientists in combinatorial optimization

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Particle gflownets speed up training in complex discrete models

Particle GFlowNets: Rethinking Generative Marginalization Models

Abstract: Generative Marginalization Models (MaMs) have been recently introduced as efficient neural sampling models for any-order autoregressive modelling of discrete distributions. By learning both the marginal and conditional probabilities of a persistent-block Gibbs sampler, MaMs enable fast posterior evaluation with a single neural network forward pass. While prior work has considered MaMs to be distinct from Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a well-established paradigm for inference in discrete stochastic models, we show that they are equivalent. Then, we also extend MaMs' sampling strategy to non-autoregressive generative processes. In particular, we describe an automatic criterion for full-state rejuvenation of the Gibbs sampler, derived from the Gelman-Rubin statistic, which plays a key role in speeding up learning convergence. Our experiments show that our method, called Particle GFlowNets, markedly accelerates training in large combinatorial spaces.

Thu 10 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Modeling complex systems that involve many choices often takes a long time to learn and simulate. The paper shows that two previous approaches, called MaMs and GFlowNets, are actually the same. Then, the authors improve the method by introducing a way to refresh the sampler at certain points using a statistical check. This helps the training process go faster, especially when working with big problems involving many combinations.
Open 2609.11538v1