In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

[Q]: One of the most successful techniques in generative models has been decomposing a complicated generation task into a series of simpler generation tasks.   For example, generating an image at a low resolution and then learning to refine that into a high resolution image often improves results substantially.   Here we explore a novel strategy for decomposing generation for complicated objects in which we first generate latent variables which describe a subset of the observed variables, and then map from these latent variables to the observed space.   We show that this allows us to achieve decoupled training of complicated generative models and present both theoretical and experimental results supporting the benefit of such an approach.  
[A]: Decompose the task of learning a generative model into learning disentangled latent factors for subsets of the data and then learning the joint over those latent factors.  


[Q]: Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are 
 variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with limitations in practice: MCMC methods can be computationally demanding; VI methods may have large bias. 
 In this work, we aim to improve upon MCMC and VI by a novel hybrid method based on the idea of reducing simulation bias of finite-length MCMC chains using gradient-based optimisation. The proposed method can generate low-biased samples by increasing the length of MCMC simulation and optimising the MCMC hyper-parameters, which offers attractive balance between approximation bias and computational efficiency. We show that our method produces promising results on popular benchmarks when compared to recent hybrid methods of MCMC and VI.
[A]: In this work, we aim to improve upon MCMC and VI by a novel hybrid method based on the idea of reducing simulation bias of finite-length MCMC chains using gradient-based optimisation.


[Q]: We study the problem of explaining a rich class of behavioral properties of deep neural networks. Our influence-directed explanations approach this problem by peering inside the network to identify neurons with high influence on the property of interest using an axiomatically justified influence measure, and then providing an interpretation for the concepts these neurons represent. We evaluate our approach by training convolutional neural networks on Pubfig, ImageNet, and Diabetic Retinopathy datasets.   Our evaluation demonstrates that influence-directed explanations (1) localize features used by the network, (2) isolate features distinguishing related instances, (3) help extract the essence of what the network learned about the class, and (4) assist in debugging misclassifications.

[A]:
We present an influence-directed approach to constructing explanations for the behavior of deep convolutional networks, and show how it can be used to answer a broad set of questions that could not be addressed by prior work.