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arXiv · 1704.02916

Reinterpreting Importance-Weighted Autoencoders

Chris Cremer·Quaid Morris·David Duvenaud
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Abstract

The standard interpretation of importance-weighted autoencoders is that they maximize a tighter lower bound on the marginal likelihood than the standard evidence lower bound. We give an alternate interpretation of this procedure: that it optimizes the standard variational lower bound, but using a more complex distribution. We formally derive this result, present a tighter lower bound, and visualize the implicit importance-weighted distribution.

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Chris Cremer, Quaid Morris, David Duvenaud. 2017-08-15. Reinterpreting Importance-Weighted Autoencoders. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02916

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