Differentiable Antithetic Sampling for Variance Reduction in Stochastic Variational Inference

10/05/2018

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by   Mike Wu, et al.

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Stochastic optimization techniques are standard in variational inference algorithms. These methods estimate gradients by approximating expectations with independent Monte Carlo samples. In this paper, we explore a technique that uses correlated, but more representative , samples to reduce estimator variance. Specifically, we show how to generate antithetic samples that match sample moments with the true moments of an underlying importance distribution. Combining a differentiable antithetic sampler with modern stochastic variational inference, we showcase the effectiveness of this approach for learning a deep generative model.