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@ARTICLE{Nicoli:623656,
author = {Nicoli, Kim A. and Anders, Christopher J. and Hartung,
Tobias and Jansen, Karl and Kessel, Pan and Nakajima,
Shinichi},
title = {{D}etecting and mitigating mode-collapse for flow-based
sampling of lattice field theories},
journal = {Physical review / D},
volume = {108},
number = {11},
issn = {2470-0010},
address = {Ridge, NY},
publisher = {American Physical Society},
reportid = {PUBDB-2025-00725, arXiv:2302.14082},
pages = {114501},
year = {2023},
note = {16 pages, 7 figures, 6 pages of supplement material},
abstract = {We study the consequences of mode-collapse of normalizing
flows in the context of lattice field theory. Normalizing
flows allow for independent sampling. For this reason, it is
hoped that they can avoid the tunneling problem of
local-update Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms for
multimodal distributions. In this work, we first point out
that the tunneling problem is also present for normalizing
flows but is shifted from the sampling to the algorithm’s
training phase. Specifically, normalizing flows often suffer
from mode-collapse for which the training process assigns
vanishingly low probability mass to relevant modes of the
physical distribution. This may result in a significant bias
when the flow is used as a sampler in a Markov-Chain or with
importance sampling. We propose a metric to quantify the
degree of mode-collapse and derive a bound on the resulting
bias. Furthermore, we propose various mitigation strategies
in particular in the context of estimating thermodynamic
observables, such as the free energy.},
keywords = {Monte Carlo: Markov chain (INSPIRE) / flow (INSPIRE) /
tunneling (INSPIRE) / lattice field theory (INSPIRE) /
lattice (INSPIRE) / U(1) (INSPIRE) / SU(N) (INSPIRE) /
statistical analysis (INSPIRE) / energy: density (INSPIRE) /
collapse (INSPIRE) / partition function (INSPIRE) /
spontaneous symmetry breaking (INSPIRE) / thermodynamical
(INSPIRE) / free energy (INSPIRE)},
cin = {CQTA},
ddc = {530},
cid = {I:(DE-H253)CQTA-20221102},
pnm = {611 - Fundamental Particles and Forces (POF4-611) / QUEST -
QUantum computing for Excellence in Science and Technology
(101087126) / AQTIVATE - Advanced computing, quantum
algorithms, and data-driven approaches for science,
technology and engineering (101072344)},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF4-611 / G:(EU-Grant)101087126 /
G:(EU-Grant)101072344},
experiment = {EXP:(DE-MLZ)NOSPEC-20140101},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)16},
eprint = {2302.14082},
howpublished = {arXiv:2302.14082},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
SLACcitation = {$\%\%CITATION$ = $arXiv:2302.14082;\%\%$},
UT = {WOS:001137344800005},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevD.108.114501},
url = {https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/623656},
}