{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-generative-flow-for-conditional-sampling","title":"A generative flow for conditional sampling via optimal transport","arxiv_id":"2307.04102","date":"2023-07-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jason Alfonso","Ricardo Baptista","Anupam Bhakta","Noam Gal","Alfin Hou","Isa Lyubimova","Daniel Pocklington","Josef Sajonz","Giulio Trigila","Ryan Tsai"],"abstract":"Sampling conditional distributions is a fundamental task for Bayesian inference and density estimation. Generative models, such as normalizing flows and generative adversarial networks, characterize conditional distributions by learning a transport map that pushes forward a simple reference (e.g., a standard Gaussian) to a target distribution. While these approaches successfully describe many non-Gaussian problems, their performance is often limited by parametric bias and the reliability of gradient-based (adversarial) optimizers to learn these transformations. This work proposes a non-parametric generative model that iteratively maps reference samples to the target. The model uses block-triangular transport maps, whose components are shown to characterize conditionals of the target distribution. These maps arise from solving an optimal transport problem with a weighted $L^2$ cost function, thereby extending the data-driven approach in [Trigila and Tabak, 2016] for conditional sampling. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a two dimensional example and on a parameter inference problem involving nonlinear ODEs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04102v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.04102v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-generative-flow-for-conditional-sampling","repo_url":"https://github.com/giuliotrigila/moonexample","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-inference","task_name":"Bayesian Inference"},{"task_slug":"density-estimation","task_name":"Density Estimation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"normalizing-flows","method_name":"Normalizing Flows"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}