The Generalized Reparameterization Gradient
The reparameterization gradient has become a widely used method to obtain Monte Carlo gradients to optimize the variational objective. However, this technique does not easily apply to commonly used distributions such as beta or gamma without further approximations, and most practical applications of the reparameterization gradient fit Gaussian distributions. In this paper, we introduce the generalized reparameterization gradient, a method that extends the reparameterization gradient to a wider class of variational distributions. Generalized reparameterizations use invertible transformations of the latent variables which lead to transformed distributions that weakly depend on the variational parameters. This results in new Monte Carlo gradients that combine reparameterization gradients and score function gradients. We demonstrate our approach on variational inference for two complex probabilistic models. The generalized reparameterization is effective: even a single sample from the variational distribution is enough to obtain a low-variance gradient.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Variational InferenceSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The Generalized Reparameterization Gradient
The reparameterization gradient has become a widely used method to obtain Monte Carlo gradients to optimize the variational objective. However, this technique does not easily apply to commonly used distributions such as …
Variational InferenceGeneralized Transformation-based Gradient
The reparameterization trick has become one of the most useful tools in the field of variational inference. However, the reparameterization trick is based on the standardization transformation which restricts the scope o…
Variational InferenceGeneralized Doubly-Reparameterized Gradient Estimators
Efficient low-variance gradient estimation enabled by the reparameterization trick (RT) has been essential to the success of variational autoencoders. Doubly-reparameterized gradients (DReGs) improve on the RT for multi-…
Generalized Doubly Reparameterized Gradient Estimators
Efficient low-variance gradient estimation enabled by the reparameterization trick (RT) has been essential to the success of variational autoencoders. Doubly-reparameterized gradients (DReGs) improve on the RT for multi-…
Perturbative Black Box Variational Inference
Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view…
Gaussian ProcessesVariational Inference