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Title: State Space LSTM Models with Particle MCMC Inference

Paper content:
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is one of the most powerful sequence models.
Despite the strong performance, however, it lacks the nice interpretability as in state space models.
In this paper, we present a way to combine the best of both worlds by introducing State Space LSTM (SSL), which generalizes the earlier work \cite{zaheer2017latent} of combining topic models with LSTM.
However, unlike \cite{zaheer2017latent}, we do not make any factorization assumptions in our inference algorithm.
We present an efficient sampler based on sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method that draws from the joint posterior directly.
Experimental results confirms the superiority and stability of this SMC inference algorithm on a variety of domains.
State space models (SSMs), such as hidden Markov models (HMM) and linear dynamical systems (LDS), have been the workhorse of sequence modeling in the past decades From a graphical model perspective, efficient message passing algorithms BID34 BID17 are available in compact closed form thanks to their simple linear Markov structure.
However, simplicity comes at a cost: real world sequences can have long-range dependencies that cannot be captured by Markov models; and the linearity of transition and emission restricts the flexibility of the model for complex sequences.A popular alternative is the recurrent neural networks (RNN), for instance the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) BID14 ) which has become a standard for sequence modeling nowadays.
Instead of associating the observations with stochastic latent variables, RNN directly defines the distribution of each observation conditioned on the past, parameterized by a neural network.
The recurrent parameterization not only allows RNN to provide a rich function class, but also permits scalable stochastic optimization such as the backpropagation through time (BPTT) algorithm.
However, flexibility does not come for free as well: due to the complex form of the transition function, the hidden states of RNN are often hard to interpret.
Moreover, it can require large amount of parameters for seemingly simple sequence models BID35 .In
this paper, we propose a new class of models State Space LSTM (SSL) that combines the best of both worlds. We
show that SSLs can handle nonlinear, non-Markovian dynamics like RNNs, while retaining the probabilistic interpretations of SSMs. The
intuition, in short, is to separate the state space from the sample space. In
particular, instead of directly estimating the dynamics from the observed sequence, we focus on modeling the sequence of latent states, which may represent the true underlying dynamics that generated the noisy observations. Unlike
SSMs, where the same goal is pursued under linearity and Markov assumption, we alleviate the restriction by directly modeling the transition function between states parameterized by a neural network. On the
other hand, we bridge the state space and the sample space using classical probabilistic relation, which not only brings additional interpretability, but also enables the LSTM to work with more structured representation rather than the noisy observations. Indeed
, parameter estimation of such models can be nontrivial. Since
the LSTM is defined over a sequence of latent variables rather than observations, it is not straightforward to apply the usual BPTT algorithm without making variational approximations. In BID35
, which is an instance of SSL, an EM-type approach was employed: the algorithm alternates between imputing the latent states and optimizing the LSTM over the imputed sequences. However,
as we show below, the inference implicitly assumes the posterior is factorizable through time. This is
a restrictive assumption since the benefit of rich state transition brought by the LSTM may be neutralized by breaking down the posterior over time.We present a general parameter estimation scheme for the proposed class of models based on sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) BID8 , in particular the Particle Gibbs BID1 . Instead
of sampling each time point individually, we directly sample from the joint posterior without making limiting factorization assumptions. Through
extensive experiments we verify that sampling from the full posterior leads to significant improvement in the performance.Related works Enhancing state space models using neural networks is not a new idea. Traditional
approaches can be traced back to nonlinear extensions of linear dynamical systems, such as extended or unscented Kalman filters (Julier & Uhlmann, 1997), where both state transition and emission are generalized to nonlinear functions. The idea of
parameterizing them with neural networks can be found in BID12 , as well as many recent works BID22 BID2 BID15 BID23 BID18 thanks to the development of recognition networks BID20 BID32 . Enriching the
output distribution of RNN has also regain popularity recently. Unlike conventionally
used multinomial output or mixture density networks BID4 , recent approaches seek for more flexible family of distributions such as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) BID6 or variational auto-encoders (VAE) BID13 BID7 .On the flip side, there
have been studies in introducing stochasticity to recurrent neural networks. For instance, BID30 and
BID3 incorporated independent latent variables at each time step; while in BID9 the RNN is attached to both latent states and observations. We note that in our approach
the transition and emission are decoupled, not only for interpretability but also for efficient inference without variational assumptions.On a related note, sequential Monte Carlo methods have recently received attention in approximating the variational objective BID27 BID24 BID29 . Despite the similarity, we emphasize
that the context is different: we take a stochastic EM approach, where the full expectation in E-step is replaced by the samples from SMC. In contrast, SMC in above works is aimed
at providing a tighter lower bound for the variational objective.
In this paper we revisited the problem of posterior inference in Latent LSTM models as introduced in BID35 .
We generalized their model to accommodate a wide variety of state space models and most importantly we provided a more principled Sequential Monte-Carlo (SMC) algorithm for posterior inference.
Although the newly proposed inference method can be slower, we showed over a variety of dataset that the new SMC based algorithm is far superior and more stable.
While computation of the new SMC algorithm scales linearly with the number of particles, this can be naively parallelized.
In the future we plan to extend our work to incorporate a wider class of dynamically changing structured objects such as time-evolving graphs.

assistant: text: We present State Space LSTM models, a combination of state space models and LSTMs, and propose an inference algorithm based on sequential Monte Carlo.