20.500.12556/RUL-176286 Empirical evaluation of normalizing flows in Markov chain Monte Carlo Recent advances in MCMC use normalizing flows to precondition target distributions and enable jumps to distant regions. However, there is currently no systematic comparison of different normalizing flow architectures for MCMC. As such, many works choose simple flow architectures that are readily available and do not consider other models. Guidelines for choosing an appropriate architecture would reduce analysis time for practitioners and motivate researchers to take the recommended models as foundations to be improved. We provide the first such guideline by extensively evaluating many normalizing flow architectures on various flow-based MCMC methods and target distributions. When the target density gradient is available, we show that flow-based MCMC outperforms classic MCMC for suitable NF architecture choices with minor hyperparameter tuning. When the gradient is unavailable, flow-based MCMC wins with off-the-shelf architectures. We find contractive residual flows to be the best general-purpose models with relatively low sensitivity to hyperparameter choice. We also provide various insights into normalizing flow behavior within MCMC when varying their hyperparameters, properties of target distributions, and the overall computational budget. normalizing flow Markov chain Monte Carlo comparison sampling simulation study normalizacijski tok metode Monte Carlo markovske verige primerjava vzorčenje simulacijska študija true false true Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik Članek v reviji 2025-11-26 12:54:48 2025-11-26 12:54:49 2026-06-08 16:31:20 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2025 0 0 50 str. iss. 12, art. 282 Vol. 114 Dec. 2025 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 519.245:004.8 0885-6125 10.1007/s10994-025-06900-3 258064387 RAZ_Nabergoj_David_2025.pdf RAZ_Nabergoj_David_2025.pdf 1 23161727AE6B9C5725C215BDC3535E24 f5cb8989f99a4f2544c2393817efd4ef9545a8f81a62087589d788cbeb860c45 22518f1b-cac0-11f0-9328-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=222572 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10994-025-06900-3 1 59afd06c-cabe-11f0-9328-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=222571 Fakulteta za računalništvo in informatiko 0 0 0