Paper:
Deep State Space Models for Unconditional Word Generation
Autoregressive feedback is considered a necessity for successful unconditional text generation using stochastic sequence models. However, such feedback is known to introduce systematic biases into the training process and it obscures a principle of generation: committing to global information and forgetting local nuances. We show that a non-autoregressive deep state space model with a clear separation of global and local uncertainty can be built from only two ingredients: An independent noise source and a deterministic transition function. Recent advances on flowbased variational inference can be used to train an evidence lower-bound without resorting to annealing, auxiliary losses or similar measures. The result is a highly interpretable generative model on par with comparable auto-regressive models on the task of word generation.

Review:
This paper introduces a probabilistic model for unconditional word generation that uses state space models whose distributions are parameterized with deep neural networks. Normalizing flows are used to define flexible distributions both in the generative model and in the inference network. To improve inference the inference networks uses samples from the prior SSM transitions borrowing ideas from importance-weighted autoencoders.  I enjoyed reading this paper, as it gives many useful insights on deep state space models and more in general on probabilistic models for sequential data. Also, it introduces novel ways of parameterizing the inference network by constructing a variational approximation over the noise term rather than the state.  I appreciated the usage of unconditional word generation as a simple example whose results are easier to interpret, but the validation of these results to more complex sequential tasks would make this a much stronger submission:   - I agree on the discussions on the importance of not having the autoregressive component as most of the models in the literature. In this paper however you only focus on the "simple" sequential task of word generation, while in many cases (e.g. audio or video modelling) you have very long sequences and possibly very high dimensional observations. The natural question is then how do these results generalize to more complex tasks? Would you for example still be able to train a model with a higher dimensional state space without the autoregressive component, performing annealing or having auxiliary losses?  - In more complex tasks you often need some memory in the model (e.g. LSTM units) which is why previous works on deep state space models combine RNNs with SSMs. How would you add memory to your model? Would your conclusions still hold in this case?  Also, more in depth analysis of the novel components of your model would have been useful:  - When defining the importance weighted ELBO, you use many different samples from the generative model as an input to the inference network. Previous work used for example just the prior mean in the inference network, instead of taking all the samples which is computationally intensive.  How does the model perform if for example you only pass the prior mean instead of all the samples?  - What happens if you only use normalizing flows in generative model/inference networks, and not in both? This is more commonly done in previous papers.   Minor comments - The results on the set-based metrics and the ones in table 2 should be discussed more in depth - Is your citation style in line with the nips guidelines? Usually nips paper have numbered citations  Typos: Line 6: built Line 281: samples