arXiv:2604.08116 · v3

A unifying view of contrastive learning, importance sampling, and bridge sampling for energy-based models

首次提交 2026-04-09 19:36

版本更新 2026-11-10 03:55

雷达观测 2026-11-11 11:04

摘要

In the last decades, energy-based models (EBMs) have become an important class of probabilistic models in which a component of the likelihood is intractable and therefore cannot be evaluated explicitly. Consequently, parameter estimation in EBMs is challenging for conventional inference methods. This work is a review paper that brings together these different methodological contributions within a unified framework, highlighting the connections among noise contrastive estimation (NCE), reverse logistic regression (RLR), Bennett's acceptance-ratio (BAR) method, multiple importance sampling (MIS), and bridge sampling within the context of EBMs. Some of them are equivalent under specific conditions. This unified perspective clarifies relationships among existing methods and enables the development of new estimators, with the potential to improve statistical and computational efficiency. Furthermore, this study helps elucidate the success of NCE in terms of its flexibility and robustness, while also identifying scenarios in which its performance can be further improved. Our aim is to provide a self-contained and accessible treatment, with clear and straightforward derivations, that brings together these contributions within a common framework and makes the main results and their underlying ideas understandable to a broader readership. The contribution is twofold. First, this work serves as a comprehensive tutorial for researchers entering the field, introducing the fundamental concepts and derivations. Second, it offers a thorough review for experienced practitioners. The code used in the numerical experiments is available to support the reproducibility of the results.