Task: Language Identification
Input (Spanish, English): UPDATE: I have read the authors' rebuttal and also the other comments in this paper's thread. My thoughts have not changed.  The authors propose using a mixture prior rather than a uni-modal prior for variational auto-encoders. They argue that the simple uni-modal prior "hinders the overall expressivity of the learned model as it cannot possibly capture more complex aspects of the data distribution."  I find the motivation of the paper suspicious because while the prior may be uni-modal, the posterior distribution is certainly not. Furthermore, a uni-modal distribution on the latent variable space can certainly still lead to the capturing of complex, multi-modal data distributions. (As the most trivial case, take the latent variable space to be a uniform distribution; take the likelihood to be a point mass given by applying the true data distribution's inverse CDF to the uniform. Such a model can capture any distribution.)  In addition, multi-modality is arguably an overfocused concept in the literature, where the (latent variable) space is hardly anymore worth capturing from a mixture of simple distributions when it is often a complex nonlinear space. It is unclear from the experiments how much the influence of the prior's multimodality influences the posterior to capture more complex phenomena, and whether this is any better than considering a more complex (but still reparameterizable) distribution on the latent space.  I recommend that this paper be rejected, and encourage the authors to more extensively study the effect of different priors.  I'd also like to make two additional comments:  While there is no length restriction at ICLR, the 14 page document can be significantly condensed without loss of describing their innovation or clarity. I recommend the authors do so.  Finally, I think it's important to note the controversy in this paper. It was submitted with many significant incomplete details (e.g., no experiments, many missing citations, a figure placed inside that was pencilled in by hand, and several missing paragraphs). These details were not completed until roughly a week(?) later. I recommend the chairs discuss this in light of what should be allowed next year.
Output (English): en