Deep and Hierarchical Implicit Models

By Dustin Tran, Rajesh Ranganath, David M. Blei. 2017

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Implicit probabilistic models are a flexible class for modeling data. They define a process to simulate observations, and unlike traditional models, they do not require a tractable likelihood function. In this paper, we develop two families of models: hierarchical implicit models and deep implicit models. They combine the idea of implicit densities with hierarchical Bayesian modeling and deep neural networks. The use of implicit models with Bayesian analysis has been limited by our ability to perform accurate and scalable inference. We develop likelihood-free variational inference (LFVI). 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. Our work scales up implicit models to sizes previously not possible and advances their modeling design. 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.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Generative Models, Probabilistic & Bayesian Methods

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Yoshua Bengio
  2. Sergey Levine
  3. Ruslan Salakhutdinov
  4. Quoc V. Le
  5. Mohit Bansal
  6. Dacheng Tao
  7. Pieter Abbeel
  8. Stefano Ermon

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

  1. Dacheng Tao
  2. Luc Van Gool
  3. Trevor Darrell
  4. Ming-Hsuan Yang
  5. Xiaogang Wang
  6. Bernt Schiele
  7. Jitendra Malik
  8. Andrew Zisserman

In Generative Models

  1. Yoshua Bengio
  2. Stefano Ermon
  3. Zhangyang Wang
  4. Jun Zhu
  5. Arash Vahdat
  6. Shiyu Chang
  7. Tianfu Wu
  8. Dacheng Tao

In Probabilistic & Bayesian Methods

  1. Yoshua Bengio
  2. David M. Blei
  3. Richard E. Turner
  4. Yee Whye Teh
  5. Michalis K. Titsias
  6. Andriy Mnih
  7. Zoubin Ghahramani
  8. Jun Zhu

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