Title: Asymmetric Variational Autoencoders,
Abstract: Variational inference for latent variable models is prevalent in various
machine learning problems, typically solved by maximizing the Evidence Lower
Bound (ELBO) of the true data likelihood with respect to a variational
distribution. However, freely enriching the family of variational distribution
is challenging since the ELBO requires variational likelihood evaluations of
the latent variables. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to enrich the
variational family by incorporating auxiliary variables to the variational
family. The resulting inference network doesn't require density evaluations for
the auxiliary variables and thus complex implicit densities over the auxiliary
variables can be constructed by neural networks. It can be shown that the
actual variational posterior of the proposed approach is essentially modeling a
rich probabilistic mixture of simple variational posterior indexed by auxiliary
variables, thus a flexible inference model can be built. Empirical evaluations
on several density estimation tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of the
proposed method.