Related papers: A Unified View on Learning Unnormalized Distributi…
Noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) is a statistically consistent method for learning unnormalized probabilistic models. It has been empirically observed that the choice of the noise distribution is crucial for NCE's performance. However,…
Many parametric statistical models are not properly normalised and only specified up to an intractable partition function, which renders parameter estimation difficult. Examples of unnormalised models are Gibbs distributions, Markov random…
By using the underlying theory of proper scoring rules, we design a family of noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) methods that are tractable for latent variable models. Both terms in the underlying NCE loss, the one using data samples and…
There are many models, often called unnormalized models, whose normalizing constants are not calculated in closed form. Maximum likelihood estimation is not directly applicable to unnormalized models. Score matching, contrastive divergence…
Self-supervised learning is an increasingly popular approach to unsupervised learning, achieving state-of-the-art results. A prevalent approach consists in contrasting data points and noise points within a classification task: this requires…
We develop a general method for estimating a finite mixture of non-normalized models. Here, a non-normalized model is defined to be a parametric distribution with an intractable normalization constant. Existing methods for estimating…
Noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) is a popular method for estimating unnormalised probabilistic models, such as energy-based models, which are effective for modelling complex data distributions. Unlike classical maximum likelihood (ML)…
Learning unnormalized statistical models (e.g., energy-based models) is computationally challenging due to the complexity of handling the partition function. To eschew this complexity, noise-contrastive estimation~(NCE) has been proposed by…
Recent methods for learning unsupervised visual representations, dubbed contrastive learning, optimize the noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) bound on mutual information between two views of an image. NCE uses randomly sampled negative…
Learning a parametric model of a data distribution is a well-known statistical problem that has seen renewed interest as it is brought to scale in deep learning. Framing the problem as a self-supervised task, where data samples are…
Unnormalised latent variable models are a broad and flexible class of statistical models. However, learning their parameters from data is intractable, and few estimation techniques are currently available for such models. To increase the…
Contrastive representation learning has proven to be an effective self-supervised learning method. Most successful approaches are based on Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) and use different views of an instance as positives that should be…
Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) has fueled major breakthroughs in representation learning and generative modeling. Yet a long-standing challenge remains: accurately estimating ratios between distributions that differ substantially, which…
Unsupervised anomaly detection is a challenging task. Autoencoders (AEs) or generative models are often employed to model the data distribution of normal inputs and subsequently identify anomalous, out-of-distribution inputs by high…
Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) is a popular approach for learning probability density functions parameterized up to a constant of proportionality. The main idea is to design a classification problem for distinguishing training data from…
Learning by contrasting positive and negative samples is a general strategy adopted by many methods. Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) for word embeddings and translating embeddings for knowledge graphs are examples in NLP employing this…
Recent research has developed several Monte Carlo methods for estimating the normalization constant (partition function) based on the idea of annealing. This means sampling successively from a path of distributions that interpolate between…
Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) is a popular method for training energy-based models (EBM) with intractable normalisation terms. The key idea of NCE is to learn by comparing unnormalised log-likelihoods of the reference and noisy…
Training energy-based models (EBMs) with noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) is theoretically feasible but practically challenging. Effective learning requires the noise distribution to be approximately similar to the target distribution,…
Estimating the parameters of probabilistic models of language such as maxent models and probabilistic neural models is computationally difficult since it involves evaluating partition functions by summing over an entire vocabulary, which…