Information-Preserving Domain Transfer with Unlabeled Data in Misspecified Simulation-Based Inference

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05652v1
• Date: Thu, 07 May 2026 04:06:53 GMT
• Title: Information-Preserving Domain Transfer with Unlabeled Data in Misspecified Simulation-Based Inference
• Abstract summary: Simulation-based inference ( SBI) provides amortized Bayesian parameter inference from simulator-generated data without requiring explicit likelihood evaluation.<n> SBI can degrade under model misspecification, where real-world observations are not well represented by the simulator used for training.<n>We propose SPIN, an SBI framework with parameter-relevant information-preserving domain transfer using unlabeled, unpaired real-world observations.
• Score: 4.129847064263056
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) provides amortized Bayesian parameter inference from simulator-generated data without requiring explicit likelihood evaluation. Its reliability can degrade under model misspecification, where real-world observations are not well represented by the simulator used for training. Existing methods using unlabeled real-world data often align simulated and real-world data distributions, but marginal alignment alone does not directly preserve parameter-relevant information needed for posterior inference. We propose SPIN, an SBI framework with parameter-relevant information-preserving domain transfer using unlabeled, unpaired real-world observations. During training, SPIN translates labeled simulator observations toward the real-world domain and back to the simulator domain, using the original simulator labels to encourage domain transfer that preserves parameter-relevant mutual information. At test time, the learned real-to-simulator transport maps real-world observations into the simulator domain for posterior inference, without requiring real-world parameter labels or paired real--simulator observations. Across controlled synthetic and physical real-world benchmarks, SPIN improves real-world posterior inference, with the improvement becoming clearer as misspecification increases.

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