Empirical Inference Article 2025

Flow annealed importance sampling bootstrap meets differentiable particle physics

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Empirical Inference
  • Doctoral Researcher
Thumb ticker sm 2023 09 s
Empirical Inference
  • Doctoral Researcher

High-energy physics requires the generation of large numbers of simulated data samples from complex but analytically tractable distributions called matrix elements. Surrogate models, such as normalizing flows, are gaining popularity for this task due to their computational efficiency. We adopt an approach based on Flow Annealed importance sampling Bootstrap (FAB) that evaluates the differentiable target density during training and helps avoid the costly generation of training data in advance. We show that FAB reaches higher sampling efficiency with fewer target evaluations in high dimensions in comparison to other methods.

Author(s): Kofler, A. and Stimper, V. and Mikhasenko, M. and Kagan, M. and Heinrich, L.
Journal: Machine Learning: Science and Technology
Volume: 6
Number (issue): 2
Year: 2025
Month: June
Publisher: IOP Publishing
BibTeX Type: Article (article)
DOI: 10.1088/2632-2153/addbc1
State: Published
URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/2632-2153/addbc1
Article Number: 025061

BibTeX

@article{Kofleretal25,
  title = {Flow annealed importance sampling bootstrap meets differentiable particle physics},
  journal = {Machine Learning: Science and Technology},
  abstract = {High-energy physics requires the generation of large numbers of simulated data samples from complex but analytically tractable distributions called matrix elements. Surrogate models, such as normalizing flows, are gaining popularity for this task due to their computational efficiency. We adopt an approach based on Flow Annealed importance sampling Bootstrap (FAB) that evaluates the differentiable target density during training and helps avoid the costly generation of training data in advance. We show that FAB reaches higher sampling efficiency with fewer target evaluations in high dimensions in comparison to other methods.},
  volume = {6},
  number = {2},
  publisher = {IOP Publishing},
  month = jun,
  year = {2025},
  author = {Kofler, A. and Stimper, V. and Mikhasenko, M. and Kagan, M. and Heinrich, L.},
  doi = {10.1088/2632-2153/addbc1},
  url = {https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/2632-2153/addbc1},
  month_numeric = {6}
}