Title
Improving Explorability in Variational Inference with Annealed Variational Objectives.
Abstract
Despite the advances in the representational capacity of approximate distributions for variational inference, the optimization process can still limit the density that is ultimately learned. We demonstrate the drawbacks of biasing the true posterior to be unimodal, and introduce Annealed Variational Objectives (AVO) into the training of hierarchical variational methods. Inspired by Annealed Importance Sampling, the proposed method facilitates learning by incorporating energy tempering into the optimization objective. In our experiments, we demonstrate our method's robustness to deterministic warm up, and the benefits of encouraging exploration in the latent space.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2018
ADVANCES IN NEURAL INFORMATION PROCESSING SYSTEMS 31 (NIPS 2018)
variational methods,variational inference
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
31
1049-5258
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chin-Wei Huang185.18
Tan, Shawn200.34
Alexandre Lacoste314713.05
Aaron C. Courville46671348.46