Gradient Estimation with Discrete Stein Operators

Code for reproducing the results in "Gradient Estimation with Discrete Stein Operators"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09497
NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper Award

Variance of Gradient Estimates for Training VAEs

Bernoulli likelihoods

Gaussian likelihoods

Dependencies

tensorflow >= 2.5.0
tensorflow-datasets >= 4.2.0
tensorflow-probability >= 0.12.2
scipy >= 1.6.3
absl >= 0.12.0
pandas >= 1.2.4
numpy >= 1.19.5
tqdm >= 4.60.0

Usage

Running VAE experiments:

python experiment_launcher_singlelayer.py --dataset={dataset} --genmo_lr={lr} --infnet_lr={lr} --encoder_type=nonlinear --grad_type={grad_type} --K={K} --D=200 --seed={seed}

• dataset:
  • dynamically binarized: mnist, fashion_mnist, omniglot.
  • non-binarized: continuous_mnist, continuous_fashion, continuous_omniglot.
• lr:
  • dynamically binarized: 1e-3 for mnist and omniglot, 3e-4 for fashion_mnist.
  • non-binarized: 1e-4.
• grad_type:
  • REINFORCE leave-one-out: reinforce_loo
  • DisARM (Dong et al., 2020): disarm
  • Double CV (Titsias & Shi, 2021): double_cv
  • RELAX (Grathwohl et al., 2017): relax (not affected by K, always using 3 evaluations of f)
  • ARMS (Dimitriev & Zhou, 2020): arms
  • RODEO (ours):
    • K=2: discrete_stein_avg
    • K>2: discrete_stein_output_avg
• K: number of samples used, equivalent to number of evaluations of f in gradient estimators except RELAX.
• seed: 1-5.

Running hierarchical VAE experiments:

python experiment_launcher_multilayer.py --dataset={dataset} --genmo_lr={lr} --infnet_lr={lr} --grad_type={grad_type} --K=2 --seed={seed}

Citation

To cite this work, please use

@inproceedings{NEURIPS2022_a5a5b0ff,
 author = {Shi, Jiaxin and Zhou, Yuhao and Hwang, Jessica and Titsias, Michalis and Mackey, Lester},
 booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
 editor = {S. Koyejo and S. Mohamed and A. Agarwal and D. Belgrave and K. Cho and A. Oh},
 pages = {25829--25841},
 publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
 title = {Gradient Estimation with Discrete Stein Operators},
 url = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/file/a5a5b0ff87c59172a13342d428b1e033-Paper-Conference.pdf},
 volume = {35},
 year = {2022}
}

Acknowledgement

The code is modified from Double CV (https://github.com/thjashin/double-cv), originally based on DisARM (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/disarm/binary) and ARMS (https://github.com/alekdimi/arms)