Essential elements of generative models

The aim of generative methods is to train a probability distribution \( p \). The methods we will focus on are:

  1. Energy based models, with the family of Boltzmann distributions as a typical example
  2. Variational autoencoders, based on our discussions on autoencoders
  3. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) and
  4. Diffusion models