Flow Annealed Importance Sampling Bootstrap

Normalizing flows are tractable density models that can approximate complicated target distributions, e.g. Boltzmann distributions of physical systems. However, current methods for training flows either suffer from mode-seeking behavior, use samples from the target generated beforehand by expensive MCMC simulations, or use stochastic losses that have very high variance. To avoid these problems, we augment flows with annealed importance sampling (AIS) and minimize the mass covering $\alpha$-divergence with $\alpha=2$, which minimizes importance weight variance. Our method, Flow AIS Bootstrap (FAB), uses AIS to generate samples in regions where the flow is a poor approximation of the target, facilitating the discovery of new modes. We target with AIS the minimum variance distribution for the estimation of the $\alpha$-divergence via importance sampling. We also use a prioritized buffer to store and reuse AIS samples. These two features significantly improve FAB's performance. We apply FAB to complex multimodal targets and show that we can approximate them very accurately where previous methods fail. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn the Boltzmann distribution of the alanine dipeptide molecule using only the unnormalized target density and without access to samples generated via Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations: FAB produces better results than training via maximum likelihood on MD samples while using 100 times fewer target evaluations. After reweighting samples with importance weights, we obtain unbiased histograms of dihedral angles that are almost identical to the ground truth ones.