GFlowNet Training by Policy Gradients

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have been shown effective to generate combinatorial objects with desired properties. We here propose a new GFlowNet training framework, with policy-dependent rewards, that bridges keeping flow balance of GFlowNets to optimizing the expected accumulated reward in traditional Reinforcement-Learning (RL). This enables the derivation of new policy-based GFlowNet training methods, in contrast to existing ones resembling value-based RL. It is known that the design of backward policies in GFlowNet training affects efficiency. We further develop a coupled training strategy that jointly solves GFlowNet forward policy training and backward policy design. Performance analysis is provided with a theoretical guarantee of our policy-based GFlowNet training. Experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets verify that our policy-based strategies provide advanced RL perspectives for robust gradient estimation to improve GFlowNet performance. Our code is available at: github.com/niupuhua1234/GFN-PG.