• Corpus ID: 195767445

# The Thermodynamic Variational Objective

@inproceedings{Masrani2019TheTV,
title={The Thermodynamic Variational Objective},
author={Vaden Masrani and Tuan Anh Le and Frank D. Wood},
booktitle={Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2019}
}
• Published in
Neural Information Processing…
28 June 2019
• Computer Science
We introduce the thermodynamic variational objective (TVO) for learning in both continuous and discrete deep generative models. The TVO arises from a key connection between variational inference and thermodynamic integration that results in a tighter lower bound to the log marginal likelihood than the standard variational variational evidence lower bound (ELBO) while remaining as broadly applicable. We provide a computationally efficient gradient estimator for the TVO that applies to continuous…

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