Papers › SoftFlow: Probabilistic Framework for Normalizing Flow on Manifolds

SoftFlow: Probabilistic Framework for Normalizing Flow on Manifolds

8 Jun 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2006.04604archive 2025-07-28

Hyeongju Kim, Hyeonseung Lee, Woo Hyun Kang, Joun Yeop Lee, Nam Soo Kim

Flow-based generative models are composed of invertible transformations between two random variables of the same dimension. Therefore, flow-based models cannot be adequately trained if the dimension of the data distribution does not match that of the underlying target distribution. In this paper, we propose SoftFlow, a probabilistic framework for training normalizing flows on manifolds. To sidestep the dimension mismatch problem, SoftFlow estimates a conditional distribution of the perturbed input data instead of learning the data distribution directly. We experimentally show that SoftFlow can capture the innate structure of the manifold data and generate high-quality samples unlike the conventional flow-based models. Furthermore, we apply the proposed framework to 3D point clouds to alleviate the difficulty of forming thin structures for flow-based models. The proposed model for 3D point clouds, namely SoftPointFlow, can estimate the distribution of various shapes more accurately and achieves state-of-the-art performance in point cloud generation.

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Code

ANLGBOY/SoftFlow mentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Point Cloud Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Point Cloud Generation ShapeNet Airplane SoftPointFlow 1-NNA-CD 70.92 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Point Cloud Generation ShapeNet Car SoftPointFlow 1-NNA-CD 62.63 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Point Cloud Generation ShapeNet Chair SoftPointFlow 1-NNA-CD 59.95 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Normalizing Flows

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