Title: Boosted Generative Models,
Abstract: We propose a novel approach for using unsupervised boosting to create an
ensemble of generative models, where models are trained in sequence to correct
earlier mistakes. Our meta-algorithmic framework can leverage any existing base
learner that permits likelihood evaluation, including recent deep expressive
models. Further, our approach allows the ensemble to include discriminative
models trained to distinguish real data from model-generated data. We show
theoretical conditions under which incorporating a new model in the ensemble
will improve the fit and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our
black-box boosting algorithms on density estimation, classification, and sample
generation on benchmark datasets for a wide range of generative models.