10,681 research outputs found
Hierarchical Implicit Models and Likelihood-Free Variational Inference
Implicit probabilistic models are a flexible class of models defined by a
simulation process for data. They form the basis for theories which encompass
our understanding of the physical world. Despite this fundamental nature, the
use of implicit models remains limited due to challenges in specifying complex
latent structure in them, and in performing inferences in such models with
large data sets. In this paper, we first introduce hierarchical implicit models
(HIMs). HIMs combine the idea of implicit densities with hierarchical Bayesian
modeling, thereby defining models via simulators of data with rich hidden
structure. Next, we develop likelihood-free variational inference (LFVI), a
scalable variational inference algorithm for HIMs. Key to LFVI is specifying a
variational family that is also implicit. This matches the model's flexibility
and allows for accurate approximation of the posterior. We demonstrate diverse
applications: a large-scale physical simulator for predator-prey populations in
ecology; a Bayesian generative adversarial network for discrete data; and a
deep implicit model for text generation.Comment: Appears in Neural Information Processing Systems, 201
Hierarchically Clustered Representation Learning
The joint optimization of representation learning and clustering in the
embedding space has experienced a breakthrough in recent years. In spite of the
advance, clustering with representation learning has been limited to flat-level
categories, which often involves cohesive clustering with a focus on instance
relations. To overcome the limitations of flat clustering, we introduce
hierarchically-clustered representation learning (HCRL), which simultaneously
optimizes representation learning and hierarchical clustering in the embedding
space. Compared with a few prior works, HCRL firstly attempts to consider a
generation of deep embeddings from every component of the hierarchy, not just
leaf components. In addition to obtaining hierarchically clustered embeddings,
we can reconstruct data by the various abstraction levels, infer the intrinsic
hierarchical structure, and learn the level-proportion features. We conducted
evaluations with image and text domains, and our quantitative analyses showed
competent likelihoods and the best accuracies compared with the baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Under review as a conference pape
Diffusion Priors In Variational Autoencoders
Among likelihood-based approaches for deep generative modelling, variational
autoencoders (VAEs) offer scalable amortized posterior inference and fast
sampling. However, VAEs are also more and more outperformed by competing models
such as normalizing flows (NFs), deep-energy models, or the new denoising
diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). In this preliminary work, we improve
VAEs by demonstrating how DDPMs can be used for modelling the prior
distribution of the latent variables. The diffusion prior model improves upon
Gaussian priors of classical VAEs and is competitive with NF-based priors.
Finally, we hypothesize that hierarchical VAEs could similarly benefit from the
enhanced capacity of diffusion priors
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