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Learning Latent Space Energy-Based Prior Model

Machine Learning 2020-10-30 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We propose to learn energy-based model (EBM) in the latent space of a generator model, so that the EBM serves as a prior model that stands on the top-down network of the generator model. Both the latent space EBM and the top-down network can be learned jointly by maximum likelihood, which involves short-run MCMC sampling from both the prior and posterior distributions of the latent vector. Due to the low dimensionality of the latent space and the expressiveness of the top-down network, a simple EBM in latent space can capture regularities in the data effectively, and MCMC sampling in latent space is efficient and mixes well. We show that the learned model exhibits strong performances in terms of image and text generation and anomaly detection. The one-page code can be found in supplementary materials.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.08205,
  title  = {Learning Latent Space Energy-Based Prior Model},
  author = {Bo Pang and Tian Han and Erik Nijkamp and Song-Chun Zhu and Ying Nian Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.08205},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2020 Camera-Ready

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:19:35.409Z