Timezone: »

 
Poster
Trajectory balance: Improved credit assignment in GFlowNets
Nikolay Malkin · Moksh Jain · Emmanuel Bengio · Chen Sun · Yoshua Bengio

Wed Nov 30 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Hall J #116
in Poster Session 4 »

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a method for learning a stochastic policy for generating compositional objects, such as graphs or strings, from a given unnormalized density by sequences of actions, where many possible action sequences may lead to the same object. We find previously proposed learning objectives for GFlowNets, flow matching and detailed balance, which are analogous to temporal difference learning, to be prone to inefficient credit propagation across long action sequences. We thus propose a new learning objective for GFlowNets, trajectory balance, as a more efficient alternative to previously used objectives. We prove that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution. In experiments on four distinct domains, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectory balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.

Keywords: Generative Models · Reinforcement Learning · GFlowNets · molecule design
[ Paper]  [ Slides]  [ Poster]  [ OpenReview] 

Author Information

Nikolay Malkin (Mila / Université de Montréal)
Moksh Jain (MILA / UdeM)

MSc Student at MILA interested in learning based approaches for global optimization.

Emmanuel Bengio (Recursion)
Chen Sun (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, University of Montreal, University of Montreal)
Yoshua Bengio (Mila / U. Montreal)

Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor in the computer science and operations research department at U. Montreal, scientific director and founder of Mila and of IVADO, Turing Award 2018 recipient, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms, as well as a Canada AI CIFAR Chair. He pioneered deep learning and has been getting the most citations per day in 2018 among all computer scientists, worldwide. He is an officer of the Order of Canada, member of the Royal Society of Canada, was awarded the Killam Prize, the Marie-Victorin Prize and the Radio-Canada Scientist of the year in 2017, and he is a member of the NeurIPS advisory board and co-founder of the ICLR conference, as well as program director of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains. His goal is to contribute to uncover the principles giving rise to intelligence through learning, as well as favour the development of AI for the benefit of all.

More from the Same Authors