English

Reinterpreting Importance-Weighted Autoencoders

Machine Learning 2017-08-16 v2

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.02916,
  title  = {Reinterpreting Importance-Weighted Autoencoders},
  author = {Chris Cremer and Quaid Morris and David Duvenaud},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02916},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

ICLR 2017 Workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:13:00.841Z