2025/05/19 by Wanli Sun, Sun, Wanli, Anton Ragni +1
Decision Sciences · Energy · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Construction Project Management and Performance #Energy Efficiency and Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Forecasting Techniques and Applications #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.13771
openalex publication_date 2025/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) is a popular method for training energy-based models (EBM) with intractable normalisation terms. The key idea of NCE is to learn by comparing unnormalised log-likelihoods of the reference and noisy samples, thus avoiding explicitly computing normalisation terms. However, NCE critically relies on the quality of noisy samples. Recently, sliced score matching (SSM) has been popularised by closely related diffusion models (DM). Unlike NCE, SSM learns a gradient of log-likelihood, or score, by learning distribution of its projections on randomly chosen directions. However, both NCE and SSM disregard the form of log-likelihood function, which is problematic given that EBMs and DMs make use of first-order optimisation during inference. This paper proposes a new criterion that learns scores more suitable for first-order schemes. Experiments contrasts these approaches for training EBMs.