sylvester: Sylvester Normalizing Flow

In shrinkGPR: Scalable Gaussian Process Regression with Hierarchical Shrinkage Priors

Sylvester Normalizing Flow

Description

The sylvester function implements Sylvester normalizing flows as described by van den Berg et al. (2018) in "Sylvester Normalizing Flows for Variational Inference." This flow applies a sequence of invertible transformations to map a simple base distribution to a more complex target distribution, allowing for flexible posterior approximations in Gaussian process regression models.

Usage

sylvester(d, n_householder)

Arguments

d	An integer specifying the latent dimensionality of the input space.
n_householder	An optional integer specifying the number of Householder reflections used to orthogonalize the transformation. Defaults to d - 1.

Details

The Sylvester flow uses two triangular matrices (R1 and R2) and Householder reflections to construct invertible transformations. The transformation is parameterized as follows:

z = Q R_1 h(Q^T R_2 zk + b) + zk,

where:

• Q is an orthogonal matrix obtained via Householder reflections.

• R1 and R2 are upper triangular matrices with learned diagonal elements.

• h is a non-linear activation function (default: torch_tanh).

• b is a learned bias vector.

The log determinant of the Jacobian is computed to ensure the invertibility of the transformation and is given by:

\log |det J| = \sum_{i=1}^d \log |diag_1[i] \cdot diag_2[i] \cdot h'(RQ^T zk + b) + 1|,

where diag_1 and diag_2 are the learned diagonal elements of R1 and R2, respectively, and h\' is the derivative of the activation function.

Value

An nn_module object representing the Sylvester normalizing flow. The module has the following key components:

• forward(zk): The forward pass computes the transformed variable z and the log determinant of the Jacobian.

• Internal parameters include matrices R1 and R2, diagonal elements, and Householder reflections used for orthogonalization.

References

van den Berg, R., Hasenclever, L., Tomczak, J. M., & Welling, M. (2018). "Sylvester Normalizing Flows for Variational Inference." Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2018).

Examples

if (torch::torch_is_installed()) {
  # Example: Initialize a Sylvester flow
  d <- 5
  n_householder <- 4
  flow <- sylvester(d, n_householder)

  # Forward pass through the flow
  zk <- torch::torch_randn(10, d)  # Batch of 10 samples
  result <- flow(zk)

  print(result$zk)
  print(result$log_diag_j)
}

shrinkGPR documentation built on Nov. 6, 2025, 5:09 p.m.