Energy based diffusion generator for efficient sampling of Boltzmann distributions

원문 초록

Sampling from Boltzmann distributions, particularly those tied to high-dimensional and complex energy functions, poses a significant challenge in many fields. In this work, we present the Energy-Based Diffusion Generator (EDG), a novel approach that integrates ideas from variational autoencoders and diffusion models. EDG leverages a decoder to transform latent variables from a simple distribution into samples approximating the target Boltzmann distribution, while the diffusion-based encoder provides an accurate estimate of the Kullback-Leibler divergence during training. Notably, EDG is simulation-free, eliminating the need to solve ordinary or stochastic differential equations during training. Furthermore, by removing constraints such as bijectivity in the decoder, EDG allows for flexible network design. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the superior performance of EDG across a variety of complex distribution tasks, outperforming existing methods.