Kolmogorov-Arnold Energy Models: Fast, Interpretable Generative Modeling

Generative models typically rely on either simple latent priors (e.g., Variational Autoencoders, VAEs), which are efficient but limited, or expressive iterative samplers (e.g., Diffusion and Energy-based Models), which are costly and opaque. We introduce a new unsupervised model, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Energy Model (KAEM), to bridge this trade-off and provide new opportunities for interpretability. Based on a novel adaptation of the Kolmogorov-Arnold Representation Theorem, KAEM imposes a univariate latent prior, enabling fast and exact inference via the inverse transform method. On small datasets, we show that importance sampling becomes a tractable, unbiased, and single-pass posterior inference method. For settings requiring exploration, we propose a population-based strategy that decomposes the posterior into a sequence of annealed distributions, serving as a new remedy for poor mixing in Energy-based Models. KAEM attains competitive Fr'echet Inception Distance among latent-prior models on SVHN, CIFAR10, and CelebA while sampling in a single forward pass at lower cost than iterative EBMs, and exposing an interpretable prior built from 1D densities.