Learning Energy-Based Generative Models via Potential Flow: A Variational Principle Approach to Probability Density Homotopy Matching

Junn Yong Loo, Leong Fang Yu, Michelle Adeline, Julia K. Lau, Hwa Hui Tew, Arghya Pal, VISHNU MONN BASKARAN, Chee-Ming Ting, Raphael CW Phan

Abstract: Energy-based models (EBMs) are a powerful class of probabilistic generative models due to their flexibility and interpretability. However, relationships between potential flows and explicit EBMs remain underexplored, while contrastive divergence training via implicit Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is often unstable and expensive in high-dimensional settings. In this paper, we propose Variational Potential (VAPO) Flow Bayes, a new energy-based generative framework that eliminates the need for implicit MCMC sampling and does not rely on auxiliary networks or cooperative training. VAPO learns an energy-parameterized potential flow by constructing a flow-driven density homotopy that is matched to the data distribution through a variational loss minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the flow-driven and marginal homotopies. This principled formulation enables robust and efficient generative modeling while preserving the interpretability of EBMs. Experimental results on image generation, interpolation, out-of-distribution detection, and compositional generation confirm the effectiveness of VAPO, showing that our method performs competitively with existing approaches in terms of sample quality and versatility across diverse generative modeling tasks.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Changes Since Last Submission: Submitted is the camera-ready version.

Code: https://github.com/ljun0004/VAPO

Assigned Action Editor: ~Hankook_Lee1

Submission Number: 4168