A Batch Normalized Inference Network Keeps the KL Vanishing Away Qile Zhu1, Wei Bi2, Xiaojiang Liu2, Xiyao Ma1, Xiaolin Li3 and Dapeng Wu1 1University of Florida, 2Tencent AI Lab, 3AI Institute, Tongdun Technology valder,maxiy,dpwu @ufl.edu victoriabi,kieranliuf
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[email protected] Abstract inference, VAE first samples the latent variable from the prior distribution and then feeds it into Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used the decoder to generate an instance. VAE has been as a generative model to approximate a successfully applied in many NLP tasks, including model’s posterior on latent variables by com- bining the amortized variational inference and topic modeling (Srivastava and Sutton, 2017; Miao deep neural networks. However, when paired et al., 2016; Zhu et al., 2018), language modeling with strong autoregressive decoders, VAE of- (Bowman et al., 2016), text generation (Zhao et al., ten converges to a degenerated local optimum 2017b) and text classification (Xu et al., 2017). known as “posterior collapse”. Previous ap- An autoregressive decoder (e.g., a recurrent neu- proaches consider the Kullback–Leibler diver- ral network) is a common choice to model the gence (KL) individual for each datapoint. We text data. However, when paired with strong au- propose to let the KL follow a distribution toregressive decoders such as LSTMs (Hochreiter across the whole dataset, and analyze that it is sufficient to prevent posterior collapse by keep- and Schmidhuber, 1997) and trained under conven- ing the expectation of the KL’s distribution tional training strategy, VAE suffers from a well- positive. Then we propose Batch Normalized- known problem named the posterior collapse or VAE (BN-VAE), a simple but effective ap- the KL vanishing problem.