Papers › Flows for simultaneous manifold learning and density estimation

Flows for simultaneous manifold learning and density estimation

31 Mar 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2003.13913archive 2025-07-28

Johann Brehmer, Kyle Cranmer

We introduce manifold-learning flows (M-flows), a new class of generative models that simultaneously learn the data manifold as well as a tractable probability density on that manifold. Combining aspects of normalizing flows, GANs, autoencoders, and energy-based models, they have the potential to represent datasets with a manifold structure more faithfully and provide handles on dimensionality reduction, denoising, and out-of-distribution detection. We argue why such models should not be trained by maximum likelihood alone and present a new training algorithm that separates manifold and density updates. In a range of experiments we demonstrate how M-flows learn the data manifold and allow for better inference than standard flows in the ambient data space.

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johannbrehmer/manifold-flow officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
layer6ai-labs/rectangular-flows mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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DenoisingDensity EstimationDimensionality ReductionOut-of-Distribution Detection

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