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We present a deep generative model, named Monge-Amp\`ere flow, which builds on continuous-time gradient flow arising from the Monge-Amp\`ere equation in optimal transport theory.
The generative map from the latent space to the data space follows a dynamical system, where a learnable potential function guides a compressible fluid to flow towards the target density distribution.
Training of the model amounts to solving an optimal control problem.
The Monge-Amp\`ere flow has tractable likelihoods and supports efficient sampling and inference.
One can easily impose symmetry constraints in the generative model by designing suitable scalar potential functions.
We apply the approach to unsupervised density estimation of the MNIST dataset and variational calculation of the two-dimensional Ising model at the critical point.
This approach brings insights and techniques from Monge-Amp\`ere equation, optimal transport, and fluid dynamics into reversible flow-based generative models.
Generative modeling is a central topic in modern deep learning research BID20 which finds broad applications in image processing, speech synthesis, reinforcement learning, as well as in solving inverse problems and statistical physics problems.
The goal of generative modeling is to capture the full joint probability distribution of high dimensional data and generate new samples according to the learned distribution.
There have been significant advances in generative modeling in recent years.
Of particular interests are the variational autoencoders (VAEs) BID33 BID47 , generative adversarial networks (GANs) BID19 , and autoregressive models BID18 BID34 BID55 a; BID44 .
Besides, there is another class of generative models which has so far gained less attention compared to the aforementioned models.
These models invoke a sequence of diffeomorphism to connect between latent variables with a simple base distribution and data which follow a complex distribution.
Examples of these flow-based generative models include the NICE and the RealNVP networks BID12 , and the more recently proposed Glow model BID32 .
These models enjoy favorable properties such as tractable likelihoods and efficient exact inference due to invertibility of the network.
A key concern in the design of flow-based generative models has been the tradeoff between the expressive power of the generative map and the efficiency of training and sampling.
One typically needs to impose additional constraints in the network architecture BID12 BID46 BID34 BID44 , which unfortunately weakens the model compared to other generative models.
In addition, another challenge to generative modeling is how to impose symmetry conditions such that the model generates symmetry related configurations with equal probability.
To further unleash the power of the flow-based generative model, we draw inspirations from the optimal transport theory BID56 BID57 BID45 and dynamical systems BID30 .
Optimal transport theory concerns the problem of connecting two probability distributions p(z) and q(x) via transportation z → x at a minimal cost.
In this context, the Brenier theorem BID4 states that under the quadratic distance measure, the optimal generative map is the gradient of a convex function.
This motivates us to parametrize the vector-valued generative map as the gradient of a scalar potential function, thereby formulating the generation process as a continuous-time gradient flow BID0 .
In this regard, a generative map is naturally viewed as a deterministic dynamical system which evolves over time.
Numerical integration of the dynamical system gives rise to the neural network representation of the generative model.
To this end, E (2017) proposes a dynamical system perspective to machine learning, wherein the training procedure is viewed as a control problem, and the algorithm like back-propagation is naturally derived from the optimal control principle BID36 .
Moreover, implemented the generative map as an ODE integration and employed efficient adjoint analysis for its training.
In this paper, we devise the Monge-Ampère flow as a new generative model and apply it to two problems: density estimation of the MNIST dataset and variational calculation of the Ising model.
In our approach, the probability density is modeled by a compressible fluid, which evolves under the gradient flow of a learnable potential function.
The flow has tractable likelihoods and exhibits the same computational complexity for sampling and inference.
Moreover, a nice feature of the MongeAmpère flow is that one can construct symmetric generative models more easily by incorporating the symmetries into the scalar potential.
The simplicity and generality of this framework allow the principled design of the generative map and gives rise to lightweight yet powerful generative models.
Consider latent variables z and physical variables x both living in R N .
Given a diffeomorphism between them, x = x(z), the probability densities in the latent and physical spaces are related by p(z) = q(x) det ∂x ∂z .
The Brenier theorem BID4 implies that instead of dealing with a multi-variable generative map, one can consider a scalar valued generating function x = ∇u(z), where the convex Brenier potential u satisfies the Monge-Ampère equation BID5 p DISPLAYFORM0 Given the densities p and q, solving the Monge-Ampère equation for u turns out to be challenging due to the nonlinearity in the determinant.
Moreover, for typical machine learning and statistical physics problems, an additional challenge is that one does not even have direct access to both probability densities p and q. Instead, one only has independent and identically distributed samples from one of them, or one only knows one of the distributions up to a normalization constant.
Therefore, solving the Brenier potential in these contexts is a control problem instead of a boundary value problem.
An additional computational challenge is that even for a given Brenier potential, the righthand side of equation 1 involves the determinant of the Hessian matrix, which scales unfavorably as O(N 3 ) with the dimensionality of the problem.
To address these problems, we consider the Monge-Ampère equation in its linearized form, where the transformation is infinitesimal BID56 .
We write the convex Brenier potential as u(z) = ||z|| 2 /2 + ϕ(z), thus x − z = ∇ϕ(z), and correspondingly ln q(x) − ln p(z) = − Tr ln I + DISPLAYFORM1 In the last equation we expand the logarithmic function and write the trace of a Hessian matrix as the Laplacian operator.
Finally, taking the continuous-time limit → 0, we obtain DISPLAYFORM2 DISPLAYFORM3 such that x(0) = z, p(x, 0) = p(z), and p(x, T ) = q(x), where t denotes continuous-time and T is a fixed time horizon.
For simplicity here, we still keep the notion of x, which now depends on time.
The evolution of x from time t = 0 to T then defines our generative map.
We notice that used a more general form of these two equations as a continuous-time normalizing flow BID46 .The two ordinary differential equations (ODEs) compose a dynamical system, which describes the flow of continuous random variables and the associated probability densities under iterative changeof-variable transformation.
To match p(x, T ) and the target density q(x), one can optimize a functional I[p(x, T ), q(x)] that measures the difference between p(x, T ) and q(x).
Thus, the training process amounts to solving an optimal control problem for the potential function: DISPLAYFORM4 DISPLAYFORM5 DISPLAYFORM6 which is the Liouville equation, namely, the continuity equation of a compressible fluid with density p(x, t) and velocity field v = ∇ϕ(x).
Obeying the continuity equation ensures that the flow conserves the total probability mass.
Moreover, the velocity field is curl free ∇ × v ≡ 0 and the fluid follows a form of gradient flow BID0 .
The irrotational flow matches one's heuristic expectation that the flow-based generative model transports probability masses.
It should be stressed that although we use the optimal transport theory to motivate model architecture design, i.e., the gradient flow for generative modeling, we do not have to employ the optimal transport objective functions.
The difference is that in generative modeling one typically fixes only one end of the probability density and aims at learning a suitable transformation to reach the other end.
While for optimal transport one has both ends fixed and aims at minimizing the transportation cost.
BID1 ; BID3 BID17 adapted the Wasserstein distances in the optimal transport theory as an objective function for generative modeling.
We parametrize the potential function ϕ(x) using a feedforward neural network and integrate the ODEs (2) and (3) to transform the data and their log-likelihoods.
Then, by applying the backpropagation algorithm through the ODE integration, we tune the parametrized potential function so that the probability density flows to the desired distribution 1 .
DISPLAYFORM0
Figure 2: Schematic illustration of two applications (a) unsupervised density estimation and (b) variational free energy calculation for a statistical mechanics problem.
In both cases, we integrate equations 2 and 3 under a parametrized potential function ϕ(x), and optimize ϕ(x) such that the density at the other end matches to the desired one.
In general, one can represent the potential function in various ways as long as the gradient and Laplacian are well defined.
Here we adopt a densely connected neural network with only one hidden layer in our minimalist implementation.
We use the softplus activation function in the hidden layers so that the potential function is differentiable to higher orders.
The gradient and the Laplacian of the potential appearing in the right-hand side of equations 2 and 3 can be computed via automatic differentiation.
We integrate equations 2 and 3 using a numerical ODE integrator.
At each integration step one advances the ODE system by a small amount, as shown in FIG1 .
Therefore, the numerical integration of ODE is equivalent to the forward evaluation of a deep residual neural network BID27 BID14 BID39 BID6 BID41 BID48 .
Alternatively, the integration can also be viewed as a recurrent neural network in which one feeds the output back into the block iteratively.
In both pictures, the network heavily shares parameters in the depth direction since the gradient and Laplacian information of the same potential function is used in each integration step.
As a result, the network is very parameter efficient.
We employ the fourth order Runge-Kutta scheme with a fixed time step , which is set such that the numerical integrator is accurate enough.
Thus, the ODE integrator block shown in figure 1(b) contains four layers of neural networks.
With a hundred integration steps, the whole ODE integration procedure corresponds to four hundreds layers of a neural network.
At the end of the integration, we obtain samples x and their likelihoods ln p(x, T ), which depends on the parametrized potential function ϕ(x).
Differentiable optimization of such deep neural network is feasible since the integrator only applies small changes to the input signal of each layer.
The deep generative model resulting from the discretization of an ODE system shows some nice features compared to the conventional neural networks.
At training time, there is then a tradeoff between the total number of integration steps and the expressibility of the potential function.
Longer integration time corresponds to a deeper network, and hence a simpler transformation at each step.
While at testing time, one can construct a variable depth neural network for the potential function.
For example, one can use a larger time step and a smaller number of integration steps for efficient inference.
Moreover, by employing a reversible ODE integrator, one can also integrate the equations 2 and 3 backward in time with the same computational complexity, and return to the starting point deterministically.
We apply the Monge-Ampère flow to unsupervised density estimation of an empirical dataset and variational calculation of a statistical mechanics problem.
Figure 2 illustrates the schemes of the two tasks.
To draw samples from the model and to evaluate their likelihoods, we simulate the fluid dynamics by integrating the ODEs (2) and (3).
We use the KL divergence as the measure of dissimilarity between the model probability density and the desired ones.
Moreover, we choose the base distribution at time t = 0 to be a simple Gaussian p(x, 0) = N (x).
See Appendix C for a summary of the hyperparameters used in the experiments.
First we perform the maximum likelihood estimation, which reduces the dissimilarity between the empirical density distribution π(x) of a given dataset and the model density p(x, T ) measured by the KL-divergence D KL (π(x) p(x, T )).
It is equivalent to minimize the negative log-likelihood (NLL): DISPLAYFORM0 To compute the model likelihood we start from MNIST samples and integrate backwards from time T to 0.
By accumulating the change in the log-likelihood 0 T d ln p(x(t), t) we obtain an estimate of the objective function in equation 6.
To model the MNIST data we need to transform the images into continuous variables.
Following BID44 , we first apply the jittering and dequantizing procedure to map the original grayscale MNIST data to a continuous space.
Next, we apply the logit transformation to map the normalized input to the logit space x → logit(λ + (1 − 2λ)x), with λ = 10 −6 .
FIG2 shows the training and test NLL compared with the best performing MADE BID18 , Real-NVP BID13 , and MAF BID44 ) models, all reported in BID44 .
Note that we have selected the results with standard Gaussian base distribution for a fair comparison.
The test NLL of the present approach is lower than previously reported values, see TAB0 for a summary.
The Monge-Ampère flow is quite parameter-efficient as it only uses about one-tenth of learnable parameters of the MAF model BID44 .The way we carry out density estimation in figure 2(a) is equivalent to transforming the data distribution π(x) to the base Gaussian distribution BID44 .
BID43 BID38 .
Inset shows representative Ising configurations generated at epochs 0, 500, 1000, 1500, respectively.
Each inset contains a 5 × 5 tile of a 16 2 Ising model.
In the lower panel, the generated samples exhibit two domains because we still impose the Z 2 inversion symmetry in the network.
Without imposing the inversion symmetry the model will generate almost all black/white images due to the ferromagnetic correlations.ization of the Gaussianization technique BID8 .
Conversely, by integrating the equations forward in time one can use the flow to map Gaussian noises to meaningful images.
For variational calculation we minimize the reverse KL divergence between the model and a given Boltzmann distribution of a physical problem D KL p(x, T ) DISPLAYFORM0 an unknown partition function due to its intractability.
In practical this amounts to minimizing the following expectation DISPLAYFORM1 To draw samples from p(x, T ) we start from the base distribution x ∼ p(x, 0) = N (x) and evolve the samples according to equation 2.
We keep track of the likelihoods of these samples by integrating equation 3 together.
The loss function equation 7 provides a variational upper bound to the physical free energy − ln Z, since DISPLAYFORM2 the objective function employs the reparametrization pathwise derivative for the gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance and scales to large systems BID33 .We apply this variational approach to the Ising model, a prototypical problem in statistical physics.
The Ising model exhibits a phase transition from ferromagnetic to paramagnetic state at the critical temperature BID43 .
Variational study of the Ising model at the critical point poses a stringent test on the probabilistic model.
To predict the thermodynamics accurately, the flow has to capture long-range correlations and rich physics due to the critical fluctuation.
In the continuous representation BID15 BID61 BID38 , the energy function of the Ising model reads (Appendix B) DISPLAYFORM3 We set the coupling K ij = (1 + √ 2)/2 to be at the critical temperature of square lattice Ising model BID43 , where i, j are nearest neighbors on the square periodic lattice.
The expectation inside the bracket of equation 7 is the energy difference between the model and the target problem.
Since one has the force information for both target problem and the network as well, one can introduce an additional term in the loss function for the force difference BID11 BID59 ).The Ising model on a periodic square lattice has a number of symmetries, e.g., the spin inversion symmetry, the spatial translational symmetry, and the D 4 rotational symmetry.
Mathematically, the symmetries manifest themselves as an invariance of the energy function E(x) = E(gx), where g is the symmetry operator that inverts or permutes the physical variables.
For physics applications, it is essential to have a generative model that respects these physical symmetries, such that they will generate symmetry-related configurations with equal probability.
Although simple symmetries such as the Z 2 inversion can be implemented by careful design of the network or simply averaging over the elements in the symmetry group BID38 , respecting even more general symmetries in a generative model turns out to be a challenging problem.
The Monge-Ampère flow naturally solves this problem by imposing the symmetry condition on the scalar potential function since the initial Gaussian distribution respects the maximum symmetry.
There have been a number of studies about how to ensure suitable symmetries in the feedforward networks in the context of discriminative modeling (Zaheer et al., 2017; BID10 .
Here we employ a simpler approach to encode symmetry in the generating process.
We express the potential as an average over all elements of the symmetry group G under consideration ϕ(x) = 1 |G| g∈Gφ (gx), where theφ in each term shares the same network parameters.
At each step of the numerical integration, we sample only one term in the symmetric average to evaluate the gradient and the Laplacian of the potential.
Thus, on average one restores the required symmetry condition in the generated samples.
This is feasible both for training and data generation since equations 2 and 3 are both linear with respect to the potential function.
The upper panel of Figure 4 shows that the variational loss equation 7 decreases towards the exact solution of the free energy (Appendix B).
The achieved 1% relative accuracy in the variational free-energy is comparable to the previously reported value (0.5%) using a network which exploits the two-dimensional nature of the problem BID38 .
The inset shows the directly generated Ising configurations from the network at different training stage.
At late stages, the network learned to produce domains of various shapes.
One also notices that the generated samples exhibit a large variety of configurations, which respects the physical symmetries.
Moreover, the network can estimate log-likelihoods for any given sample which is valuable for the quantitative study of the physical problem.
The invertible flow can also perform inverse mapping of the energy function from the physical space to the latent space.
Therefore, it can be used to accelerate Monte Carlo simulations, by either recommending the updates as a generative model BID28 BID40 or performing hybrid Monte Carlo in the latent space BID38 .
Figure 4 also compares the performances of the generative map with and without translational and rotational symmetries imposed.
It is noticeable that using the same parameters in the network and the same training strategy, the variational free energy of the one without symmetry constraint is significantly higher than the one with symmetry constraint.
Moreover, by inspecting the generated samples, one sees that the model distribution collapses to the ones with two horizontal domains.
These symmetry breaking configuration correspond to a metastable local minimum of the free energy landscape.
This comparison shows that imposing the necessary symmetry conditions is crucial for variational studies of physical problems using generative models
Normalizing flows: The present approach is closely related to the normalizing flows, where one composes bijective and differentiable transformations for generative modeling (Rezende & Mo-hamed, 2015) .
To scale to large dataset it is crucial to make the Jacobian determinant of the transformation efficiently computable.
BID12 ; BID38 ; BID32 strive the balance between expressibility and efficiency of the bijective networks by imposing block structures in the Jacobian matrix.
Our approach reduces the cubical scaling Hessian determinant to the linear scaling Laplacian calculation by taking the continuous-time limit.
The continuoustime gradient flow is more flexible in the network design since bijectivity and the efficiently tractable Jacobian determinant is naturally ensured.(Inverse) autoregressive flows: The autoregressive property could be interpreted as imposing a triangular structure in the Jacobian matrix of the flow to reduce its computational cost.
There is a trade-off between the forward and inverse transformation.
Therefore, typically the autoregressive flows are used for density estimation BID44 , while the inverse autoregressive flows are suitable for posterior in variational inference BID34 .
Moreover, these flows are only implicitly reversible, in the sense that the inverse calculation requires solving a nonlinear equation.
However, the continuous-time gradient flow has the same time complexity for both the forward and inverse transformation.
derived the continuous-time limit of the normalizing flows BID46 , which is a general form of equations 2 and 3 without the irrational condition on the velocity field.
Besides conceptual connection to the Brenier theorem in optimal transport theory, the motivation of using the gradient flow instead of more general transformations in is that it is convenient to encode symmetries in the scalar potential function.
Furthermore, BID21 made use of the Hutchinson's trace estimator BID29 to simplify the computation of the trace of Jacobian, which we could also employ for the Laplacian in equation FORMULA3 .
BID50 FORMULA0 consider generative models based on diffusion processes.
Our work is different since we consider deterministic and reversible advection flow of the fluid.
There is, in general, no stochastic force in our simulation (except the random sampling of symmetric functions done in section 4.2).
And, we always integrate the flow equation for a finite time interval instead of trying to reach a steady probability density in the asymptotic long time limit.
Dynamical system and control based methods: In a more general perspective, our approach amounts to defining a dynamical system with a target terminal condition, which is naturally viewed as a control problem (E, 2017) .
Along with this direction, BID24 BID28 offer some insights into interpreting and solving this control problem.
Moreover, the Neural ODE implements an efficient back-propagation scheme through blackbox ODE integrators based on adjoint computation, which we did not utilize at the moment.
Gradient flow of compressible fluids in a learnable potential provides a natural way to set up deep generative models.
The Monge-Ampère flow combines ideas and techniques in optimal transport, fluid dynamics, and differential dynamical systems for generative modeling.
We have adopted a minimalist implementation of the Monge-Ampère flow with a scalar potential parameterized by a single hidden layer densely connected neural network.
There are a number of immediate improvements to further boost its performance.
First, one could extend the neural network architecture of the potential function in accordance with the target problem.
For example, a convolutional neural network for data with spatial or temporal correlations.
Second, one can explore better integration schemes which exactly respect the time-reversal symmetry to ensure reversible sampling and inference.
Lastly, by employing the backpropagation scheme of through the ODE integrator one can reduce the memory consumption and achieve guaranteed convergence in the integration.
Furthermore, one can employ the Wasserstein distances BID1 instead of the KLdivergence to train the Monge-Ampère flow.
With an alternative objective function, one may obtain an even more practically useful generative model with tractable likelihood.
One may also consider using batch normalization layers during the integration of the flow BID13 BID44 .
However, since the batch normalization breaks the physical interpretation of the continuous gradient flow of a fluid, one still needs to investigate whether it plays either a theoretical or a practical role in the continuous-time flow.
Moreover, one can use a time-dependent potential ϕ(x, t) to induce an even richer gradient flow of the probability densities.
BID2 has shown that the optimal transport flow (in the sense of minimizing the spatial-time integrated kinetic energy, which upper bounds the squared Wasserstein-2 distance) follows a pressureless flow in a time-dependent potential.
The fluid moves with a constant velocity that linearly interpolates between the initial and the final density distributions.
Practically, a time-dependent potential corresponds to a deep generative model without sharing parameters in the depth direction as shown in FIG1 .
Since handling a large number of independent layers for each integration step may be computationally inefficient, one may simply accept one additional time variable in the potential function, or parametrize ϕ(x, t) as the solution of another differential equation, or partially tie the network parameters using a hyper-network BID22 .Besides applications presented here, the Monge-Ampère flow has wider applications in machine learning and physics problems since it inherits all the advantages of the other flow-based generative models BID12 BID46 BID34 BID13 BID44 .
A particular advantage of generative modeling using the Monge-Ampère flow is that it is relatively easy to impose symmetry into the scalar potential.
It is thus worth exploiting even larger symmetry groups, such as the permutation for modeling exchangeable probabilities BID35 .
Larger scale practical application in statistical and quantum physics is also feasible with the Monge-Ampère flow.
For example, one can study the physical properties of realistic molecular systems using Monge-Ampère flow for variational free energy calculation.
Lastly, since the mutual information between variables is greatly reduced in the latent space, one can also use the Monge-Ampère flow in conjunction with the latent space hybrid Monte Carlo for efficient sampling BID38 .
To gain intuition about the probability density flow under the Monge-Ampère equation, we work out a close form solution of equations 2 and 3 in a one dimensional toy problem.
Since a quadratic potential merely induces scale transformation to the data, a Gaussian distribution will remain to be a Gaussian with a different variance.
Thus, we consider ϕ(x) = λx 2 /2, and p(x, 0) = N (x), and parametrize the time dependent density as p(x, t) = DISPLAYFORM0 , and α(0) = 1.
Substitute this ansatz of the time-dependent probability density into equation 3, we have DISPLAYFORM1 where we used equation 2, i.e. = −λ, and α(t) = exp(−λt).
Therefore, under a quadratic potential the fluid parcel moves with acceleration.
The ones that are far away from the origin move faster.
And the width of the Gaussian distribution changes exponentially with time.
The Ising model is a fundamental model in statistical mechanics which allows exact solution in two dimension BID43 .
The Ising model partition function reads DISPLAYFORM0 To make it amenable to the flow approach we reformulate the Ising problem to an equivalent representation in terms of continuous variables following BID15 BID61 BID38 .
First, we offset the coupling to K + αI such that all of its eigenvalues are positive, e.g. the minimal eigenvalue of K + αI is 0.1.
This step does not affect the physical property of the Ising model except inducing a constant offset in its energies.
Next, using the Gaussian integration trick (Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation) we can decouple the Ising interaction with continuous auxiliary variables Z Ising ∝ s dx exp −
We list the hyperparameters of the network and training in TAB1 .
in the integration step in the fourth order Runge-Kutta integration.
d is the total number of integration steps.
Thus T = d is the total integration time.
h is the number of hidden neurons in the potential function.
B is the mini-batch size for training.

assistant: text: A gradient flow based dynamical system for invertible generative modeling