Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes

20 Dec 2013  ·  Diederik P. Kingma, Max Welling ·

How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational inference and learning algorithm that scales to large datasets and, under some mild differentiability conditions, even works in the intractable case. Our contributions is two-fold. First, we show that a reparameterization of the variational lower bound yields a lower bound estimator that can be straightforwardly optimized using standard stochastic gradient methods. Second, we show that for i.i.d. datasets with continuous latent variables per datapoint, posterior inference can be made especially efficient by fitting an approximate inference model (also called a recognition model) to the intractable posterior using the proposed lower bound estimator. Theoretical advantages are reflected in experimental results.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Benchmark
Image Clustering CIFAR-10 VAE Accuracy 0.291 # 28
NMI 0.245 # 24
Train set Train+Test # 1
ARI 0.168 # 23
Backbone VAE # 1
Anomaly Detection MVTec LOCO AD VAE Avg. Detection AUROC 54.3 # 34
Detection AUROC (only logical) 53.8 # 35
Detection AUROC (only structural) 54.8 # 34
Segmentation AU-sPRO (until FPR 5%) 38.2 # 16

Results from Other Papers


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Source Paper Compare
Image Clustering CIFAR-100 VAE Accuracy 0.152 # 21
NMI 0.108 # 19
Train Set Train+Test # 1
Image Clustering ImageNet-10 VAE Accuracy 0.334 # 15
NMI 0.193 # 15
Image Clustering Imagenet-dog-15 VAE Accuracy 0.179 # 16
NMI 0.107 # 17
Image Clustering STL-10 VAE Accuracy 0.282 # 23
NMI 0.200 # 20
Train Split Train+Test # 1
Image Clustering Tiny-ImageNet VAE Accuracy 0.036 # 11
NMI 0.113 # 11

Methods