Normalizing flows provide a general mechanism for defining expressive probability distributions, only requiring the specification of a (usually simple) base distribution and a series of bijective transformations. There has been much recent work on normalizing flows, ranging from improving their expressive power to expanding their application. We believe the field has now matured and is in need of a unified perspective. In this review, we attempt to provide such a perspective by describing flows through the lens of probabilistic modeling and inference. We place special emphasis on the fundamental principles of flow design, and discuss foundational topics such as expressive power and computational trade-offs. We also broaden the conceptual framing of flows by relating them to more general probability transformations. Lastly, we summarize the use of flows for tasks such as generative modeling, approximate inference, and supervised learning.

The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference, focusing on mean-field or other simple structured approximations. This restriction has a significant impact on the quality of inferences made using variational methods. We introduce a new approach for specifying flexible, arbitrarily complex and scalable approximate posterior distributions. Our approximations are distributions constructed through a normalizing flow, whereby a simple initial density is transformed into a more complex one by applying a sequence of invertible transformations until a desired level of complexity is attained. We use this view of normalizing flows to develop categories of finite and infinitesimal flows and provide a unified view of approaches for constructing rich posterior approximations. We demonstrate that the theoretical advantages of having posteriors that better match the true posterior, combined with the scalability of amortized variational approaches, provides a clear improvement in performance and applicability of variational inference.

This paper introduces the Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer (DRAW) neural network architecture for image generation. DRAW networks combine a novel spatial attention mechanism that mimics the foveation of the human eye, with a sequential variational auto-encoding framework that allows for the iterative construction of complex images. The system substantially improves on the state of the art for generative models on MNIST, and, when trained on the Street View House Numbers dataset, it generates images that cannot be distinguished from real data with the naked eye.

We marry ideas from deep neural networks and approximate Bayesian inference to derive a generalised class of deep, directed generative models, endowed with a new algorithm for scalable inference and learning. Our algorithm introduces a recognition model to represent an approximate posterior distribution and uses this for optimisation of a variational lower bound. We develop stochastic backpropagation -rules for gradient backpropagation through stochastic variables -and derive an algorithm that allows for joint optimisation of the parameters of both the generative and recognition models. We demonstrate on several real-world data sets that by using stochastic backpropagation and variational inference, we obtain models that are able to generate realistic samples of data, allow for accurate imputations of missing data, and provide a useful tool for high-dimensional data visualisation.

这项工作介绍了使用伪层作为费米子决定因素的随机估计量的费米子晶状体理论中基于流动采样的量规均值架构。这是最先进的晶格场理论计算中的默认方法，这使得对流向模型在QCD等理论的实际应用至关重要。还概述了通过标准技术（例如/奇数预处理和HasenBusch分解）来改进基于流的采样方法的方法。提供了二维U（1）和SU（3）具有$ n_f = 2 $ FERMIONS的量规理论的数值演示。

我们提出了连续重复的退火流传输蒙特卡洛（CRAFT），该方法结合了顺序的蒙特卡洛（SMC）采样器（本身是退火重要性采样的概括）与使用归一化流量的变异推断。直接训练了归一化的流量，可用于使用KL差异进行每个过渡，以在退火温度之间运输。使用归一化流/SMC近似值估算了此优化目标。我们从概念上展示并使用多个经验示例，这些示例可以改善退火流运输蒙特卡洛（Arbel等，2021），并在其上建造，也可以在基于马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛（MCMC）基于基于的随机归一化流（Wu等人。2020）。通过将工艺纳入粒子MCMC中，我们表明，这种学识渊博的采样器可以在具有挑战性的晶格场理论示例中获得令人印象深刻的准确结果。

It is common practice in deep learning to represent a measurement of the world on a discrete grid, e.g. a 2D grid of pixels. However, the underlying signal represented by these measurements is often continuous, e.g. the scene depicted in an image. A powerful continuous alternative is then to represent these measurements using an implicit neural representation, a neural function trained to output the appropriate measurement value for any input spatial location. In this paper, we take this idea to its next level: what would it take to perform deep learning on these functions instead, treating them as data? In this context we refer to the data as functa, and propose a framework for deep learning on functa. This view presents a number of challenges around efficient conversion from data to functa, compact representation of functa, and effectively solving downstream tasks on functa. We outline a recipe to overcome these challenges and apply it to a wide range of data modalities including images, 3D shapes, neural radiance fields (NeRF) and data on manifolds. We demonstrate that this approach has various compelling properties across data modalities, in particular on the canonical tasks of generative modeling, data imputation, novel view synthesis and classification. Code: https://github.com/deepmind/functa

基于标准化流的算法是由于有希望的机器学习方法，以便以可以使渐近精确的方式采样复杂的概率分布。在格子场理论的背景下，原则上的研究已经证明了这种方法对标量理论，衡量理论和统计系统的有效性。这项工作开发了能够使用动力学蜕皮的基于流动的理论采样的方法，这对于应用于粒子物理标准模型和许多冷凝物系的晶格场理论研究是必要的。作为一种实践演示，这些方法应用于通过Yukawa相互作用耦合到标量场的无大量交错的费米子的二维理论的现场配置的采样。

Reasoning about objects, relations, and physics is central to human intelligence, and a key goal of artificial intelligence. Here we introduce the interaction network, a model which can reason about how objects in complex systems interact, supporting dynamical predictions, as well as inferences about the abstract properties of the system. Our model takes graphs as input, performs object-and relation-centric reasoning in a way that is analogous to a simulation, and is implemented using deep neural networks. We evaluate its ability to reason about several challenging physical domains: n-body problems, rigid-body collision, and non-rigid dynamics. Our results show it can be trained to accurately simulate the physical trajectories of dozens of objects over thousands of time steps, estimate abstract quantities such as energy, and generalize automatically to systems with different numbers and configurations of objects and relations. Our interaction network implementation is the first general-purpose, learnable physics engine, and a powerful general framework for reasoning about object and relations in a wide variety of complex real-world domains.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) are emerging in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis because of their strong capability of generating high-fidelity samples. However, their iterative refinement process in high-dimensional data space results in slow inference speed, which restricts their application in real-time systems. Previous works have explored speeding up by minimizing the number of inference steps but at the cost of sample quality. In this work, to improve the inference speed for DDPM-based TTS model while achieving high sample quality, we propose ResGrad, a lightweight diffusion model which learns to refine the output spectrogram of an existing TTS model (e.g., FastSpeech 2) by predicting the residual between the model output and the corresponding ground-truth speech. ResGrad has several advantages: 1) Compare with other acceleration methods for DDPM which need to synthesize speech from scratch, ResGrad reduces the complexity of task by changing the generation target from ground-truth mel-spectrogram to the residual, resulting into a more lightweight model and thus a smaller real-time factor. 2) ResGrad is employed in the inference process of the existing TTS model in a plug-and-play way, without re-training this model. We verify ResGrad on the single-speaker dataset LJSpeech and two more challenging datasets with multiple speakers (LibriTTS) and high sampling rate (VCTK). Experimental results show that in comparison with other speed-up methods of DDPMs: 1) ResGrad achieves better sample quality with the same inference speed measured by real-time factor; 2) with similar speech quality, ResGrad synthesizes speech faster than baseline methods by more than 10 times. Audio samples are available at https://resgrad1.github.io/.