Generalization Gap in Amortized Inference

Mingtian Zhang; Peter Hayes; David Barber

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arXiv · 2205.11640

Generalization Gap in Amortized Inference

Mingtian Zhang·Peter Hayes·David Barber

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Abstract

The ability of likelihood-based probabilistic models to generalize to unseen data is central to many machine learning applications such as lossless compression. In this work, we study the generalization of a popular class of probabilistic model - the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). We discuss the two generalization gaps that affect VAEs and show that overfitting is usually dominated by amortized inference. Based on this observation, we propose a new training objective that improves the generalization of amortized inference. We demonstrate how our method can improve performance in the context of image modeling and lossless compression.

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BibTeX RIS

Mingtian Zhang, Peter Hayes, David Barber. 2022-05-23. Generalization Gap in Amortized Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11640

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