Task: Language Identification
Input (Spanish, English): This paper motivates the combination of autoregressive models with Variational Auto-Encoders and how to control the amount the amount of information stored in the latent code. The authors provide state-of-the-art results on MNIST, OMNIGLOT and Caltech-101. I find that the insights provided in the paper, e.g. with respect to the effect of having a more powerful decoder on learning the latent code, the bit-back coding, and the lossy decoding are well-written but are not novel. The difference between an auto-regressive prior and the inverse auto-regressive posterior is new and interesting though. The model presented combines the recent technique of PixelRNN/PixelCNN and Variational Auto-Encoders with Inverse Auto-Regressive Flows, which enables the authors to obtain state-of-the-art results on MNIST, OMNIGLOT and Caltech-101. Given the insights provided in the paper, the authors are also able to control the amount of information contained in the latent code to an extent. This paper gather several insight on Variational Auto-Encoders scattered through several publications in a well-written way. From these, the authors are able to obtain state-of-the-art models on small complexity datasets. Larger scale experiments will be necessary.
Output (English): en