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The time evolution of the probability distribution of a stochastic differential equation follows the Fokker-Planck equation, which usually has an unbounded, high-dimensional domain. Inspired by Li (2019), we propose a mesh-free Fokker-Planck solver, in which the solution to the Fokker-Planck equation is now represented by a neural network. The presence of the differential operator in the loss function improves the accuracy of the neural network representation and reduces the demand of data in the training process. Several high dimensional numerical examples are demonstrated. 

In recent years, the field of machine learning has made phenomenal progress in the pursuit of simulating real-world data generation processes. One notable example of such success is the variational autoencoder (VAE). In this work, with a small shift in perspective, we leverage and adapt VAEs for a different purpose: uncertainty quantification in scientific inverse problems. We introduce UQ-VAE: a flexible, adaptive, hybrid data/model-constrained framework for training neural networks capable of rapid modelling of the posterior distribution representing the unknown parameter of interest. Specifically, from divergence-based variational inference, our framework is derived such that most of the information usually present in scientific inverse problems is fully utilized in the training procedure. Additionally, this framework includes an adjustable hyperparameter that allows selection of the notion of distance between the posterior model and the target distribution. This introduces more flexibility in controlling how optimization directs the learning of the posterior model. Further, this framework possesses an inherent adaptive optimization property that emerges through the learning of the posterior uncertainty. Numerical results for an elliptic PDE-constrained Bayesian inverse problem are provided to verify the proposed framework.