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Esmeralda S. Whitammer

University of Edinburgh

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Action abstractions for amortized sampling

This work provides a cognitively motivated approach to action abstraction in RL and is the first demonstration of hierarchical planning in amortized sequential sampling.

Oussama Boussif, L'ena N'ehale Ezzine, Joseph D. Viviano et al. · 4 citations · ⚡1

Learning diverse attacks on large language models for robust red-teaming and safety tuning

This work proposes to use GFlowNet fine-tuning followed by a secondary smoothing phase, to train the attacker model to generate diverse and effective attack prompts, and finds that the attacks generated by the method are effective against a wide range of target LLMs, both with and without safety tuning, and transfer we...

Seanie Lee, Minsu Kim, Lynn Cherif et al. · 62 citations · ⚡8

PQMass: Probabilistic Assessment of the Quality of Generative Models using Probability Mass Estimation

PQMass provides a statistically rigorous method for assessing the performance of a single generative model or the comparison of multiple competing models and scales well to moderately high-dimensional data and thus obviates the need for feature extraction in practical applications.

Pablo Lemos, S. Sharief, Esmeralda S. Whitammer et al. · 10 citations
#machine learning Open access Oct 2023

PhyloGFN: Phylogenetic inference with generative flow networks

The framework of generative flow networks (GFlowNets) is adopted to tackle two core problems in phylogenetics: parsimony-based and Bayesian phylogenetic inference and it is demonstrated that the amortized posterior sampler, PhyloGFN, produces diverse and high-quality evolutionary hypotheses on real benchmark datasets.

Mingyang Zhou, Zichao Yan, Elliot Layne et al. · 37 citations · ⚡3

Multi-Marginal Flow Matching with Adversarially Learnt Interpolants

This paper proposes a novel flow matching method that overcomes the limitations of existing multi-marginal trajectory inference algorithms, using a GAN-inspired adversarial loss to fit neurally parametrised interpolant curves between source and target points such that the marginal distributions at intermediate time poi...

Oskar Kviman, Kirill Tamogashev, Nicola Branchini et al. · 2 citations

Data-to-Energy Stochastic Dynamics

This paper proposes the first general method for modelling Schr\"odinger bridges when one (or both) distributions are given by their unnormalised densities, with no access to data samples, and applies the newly developed algorithm to the problem of sampling posterior distributions in latent spaces of generative models,...

Kirill Tamogashev, Esmeralda S. Whitammer · 4 citations
#machine learning Preprint Jun 2025

Discrete Compositional Generation via General Soft Operators and Robust Reinforcement Learning

A novel unified operator is introduced that combines several regularized RL operators into a general framework that better targets peakier sampling distributions and is named trajectory general mellowmax (TGM), which is shown to identify higher quality, diverse candidates than baselines in both synthetic and real-world...

Marco Jiralerspong, Esther Derman, Danilo Vucetic et al. · 2 citations

Adaptive teachers for amortized samplers

The teacher, an auxiliary behavior model, is trained to sample high-loss regions of the student and can generalize across unexplored modes, thereby enhancing mode coverage by providing an efficient training curriculum.

Minsu Kim, Sanghyeok Choi, Taeyoung Yun et al. · 27 citations · ⚡6

Amortizing intractable inference in large language models

This work interprets chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrates that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization.

Edward J. Hu, Moksh Jain, Eric Elmoznino et al. · 110 citations · ⚡19
#machine learning Open access Oct 2023

Expected flow networks in stochastic environments and two-player zero-sum games

This work shows that EFlowNets outperform other GFlowNet formulations in stochastic tasks such as protein design and extends the concept of EflowNets to adversarial environments, proposing adversarial flow networks (A FlowNets) for two-player zero-sum games.

Marco Jiralerspong, Bilun Sun, Danilo Vucetic et al. · 11 citations · ⚡1
#machine learning Open access Oct 2023

Delta-AI: Local objectives for amortized inference in sparse graphical models

A new algorithm for amortized inference in sparse probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) is presented that enables off-policy training but avoids the need to instantiate all the random variables for each parameter update, thus speeding up training considerably.

J. Falet, Haebeom Lee, Esmeralda S. Whitammer et al. · 9 citations
#machine learning Open access Oct 2022

GFlowNets and variational inference

This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically used to model distributions over continuous spaces, and generative flow networks (GFlowNets), which have been used for distributions over discrete structures such as graphs. We demon...

Esmeralda S. Whitammer, S. Lahlou, T. Deleu et al. · 120 citations · ⚡9

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