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Stable Global Weighting of Flow Mixtures using Simplex Exponential Moving Average

arXiv 2607.03809 ↗First posted 4 Jul 2026cs.LG stat.MLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Normalising flows provide a powerful variational family for approximate inference, yet individual architectures often fail to generalise across heterogeneous posterior geometries. We revisit mixture-based flow formulations and introduce emphAMFmbox-VImbox-sEMA, a two-stage framework featuring a stable global weighting mechanism based on a Simplex Exponential Moving Average (sEMA) update. In Stage~1, a heterogeneous set of experts (textscRealNVP, textscMAF, textscRBIG) are trained independently to specialise in distinct structural regimes. In Stage~2, expert parameters are frozen and global mixture weights are learned through a temperature-controlled softmax of average log-likelihoods, followed by a smooth EMA update on the probability simplex. This design produces a tractable, data-agnostic gating mechanism (without per-sample gating or gradient backpropagation through weights) that adaptively reallocates capacity while avoiding component collapse. We evaluate the framework on ten posterior benchmarks: six canonical 2D synthetic families (Banana, X-Shaped, Bimodal, Multimodal, Two-moons, Rings) and four real/low-dimensional Bayesian targets (BLR, BPR, Weibull, Real-GMM2), with stronger baselines (textscNICE, textscResFlow, and EM-Mixing). Comprehensive evaluation covers NLL, KL divergence, Wasserstein-2 distance, and MMD, together with diagnostics of mixture dynamics, hyperparameter sensitivity, and cross-seed robustness. Empirically, emphAMFmbox-VImbox-sEMA achieves consistent NLL improvements over its predecessor emphAMFmbox-VI and avoids the catastrophic transport failures of single-flow baselines, while maintaining stable weight trajectories (Neff>1.4 on all datasets) with minimal computational overhead.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 8 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

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References · 8

  1. 2015Variational Inference with Normalizing Flowscited by 2,161
  2. 2016Density estimation using Real NVPcited by 2,029
  3. 2016Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticianscited by 1,466
  4. 2019Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inferencecited by 1,315
  5. 2017Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimationcited by 680
  6. 2017VAE with a VampPriorcited by 247
  7. 2016Iterative Gaussianization: from ICA to Random Rotationscited by 26
  8. 2020Variational Mixture of Normalizing Flowscited by 15

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