DisARM: An Antithetic Gradient Estimator for Binary Latent Variables

Authors: Zhe Dong, Andriy Mnih, George Tucker

NeurIPS 2020 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We evaluate Dis ARM on several generative modeling benchmarks and show that it consistently outperforms ARM and a strong independent sample baseline in terms of both variance and log-likelihood.
Researcher Affiliation Industry Zhe Dong Google Research, Brain Team zhedong@google.com Andriy Mnih Deep Mind amnih@google.com George Tucker Google Research, Brain Team gjt@google.com
Pseudocode Yes we followed the techniques used in (Tucker et al., 2017; Grathwohl et al., 2018; Yin and Zhou, 2019) to extend Dis ARM to this setting (summarized in Appendix Algorithm 1).
Open Source Code Yes Code and additional information: https://sites.google.com/view/disarm-estimator.
Open Datasets Yes We evaluate the gradient estimators on three benchmark generative modeling datasets: MNIST, Fashion MNIST and Omniglot.
Dataset Splits Yes We use the standard split into train, validation, and test sets.
Hardware Specification Yes Furthermore, training the model on a P100 GPU was nearly twice as slow for RELAX, while ARM, Dis ARM and REINFORCE LOO trained at the same speed.
Software Dependencies No The paper mentions using "Adam (Kingma and Ba, 2015)" as an optimizer but does not specify software dependencies with version numbers (e.g., Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow versions).
Experiment Setup Yes The models were trained with Adam (Kingma and Ba, 2015) using a learning rate 10 4 on mini-batches of 50 examples for 106 steps.