Convex Potential Flows: Universal Probability Distributions with Optimal Transport and Convex OptimizationDownload PDF

Published: 12 Jan 2021, Last Modified: 05 May 2023ICLR 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Normalizing flows, generative models, variational inference, invertible neural networks, universal approximation, optimal transport, convex optimization
Abstract: Flow-based models are powerful tools for designing probabilistic models with tractable density. This paper introduces Convex Potential Flows (CP-Flow), a natural and efficient parameterization of invertible models inspired by the optimal transport (OT) theory. CP-Flows are the gradient map of a strongly convex neural potential function. The convexity implies invertibility and allows us to resort to convex optimization to solve the convex conjugate for efficient inversion. To enable maximum likelihood training, we derive a new gradient estimator of the log-determinant of the Jacobian, which involves solving an inverse-Hessian vector product using the conjugate gradient method. The gradient estimator has constant-memory cost, and can be made effectively unbiased by reducing the error tolerance level of the convex optimization routine. Theoretically, we prove that CP-Flows are universal density approximators and are optimal in the OT sense. Our empirical results show that CP-Flow performs competitively on standard benchmarks of density estimation and variational inference.
One-sentence Summary: We propose to use an input-convex neural network to parameterize an invertible model with universal density approximation guarantees.
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Code: [![github](/images/github_icon.svg) CW-Huang/CP-Flow](https://github.com/CW-Huang/CP-Flow) + [![Papers with Code](/images/pwc_icon.svg) 1 community implementation](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=te7PVH1sPxJ)
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