Title: Learning to Draw Samples with Amortized Stein Variational Gradient Descent,
Abstract: We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw
samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method
is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the
output changes along a Stein variational gradient direction (Liu & Wang, 2016)
that maximally decreases the KL divergence with the target distribution. Our
method works for any target distribution specified by their unnormalized
density function, and can train any black-box architectures that are
differentiable in terms of the parameters we want to adapt. We demonstrate our
method with a number of applications, including variational autoencoder (VAE)
with expressive encoders to model complex latent space structures, and
hyper-parameter learning of MCMC samplers that allows Bayesian inference to
adaptively improve itself when seeing more data.