Paper:
Variational Walkback: Learning a Transition Operator as a Stochastic Recurrent Net
We propose a novel method to directly learn a stochastic transition operator whose repeated application provides generated samples. Traditional undirected graphical models approach this problem indirectly by learning a Markov chain model whose stationary distribution obeys detailed balance with respect to a parameterized energy function. The energy function is then modified so the model and data distributions match, with no guarantee on the number of steps required for the Markov chain to converge. Moreover, the detailed balance condition is highly restrictive: energy based models corresponding to neural networks must have symmetric weights, unlike biological neural circuits. In contrast, we develop a method for directly learning arbitrarily parameterized transition operators capable of expressing nonequilibrium stationary distributions that violate detailed balance, thereby enabling us to learn more biologically plausible asymmetric neural networks and more general non-energy based dynamical systems. The proposed training objective, which we derive via principled variational methods, encourages the transition operator to "walk back" (prefer to revert its steps) in multi-step trajectories that start at datapoints, as quickly as possible back to the original data points. We present a series of experimental results illustrating the soundness of the proposed approach, Variational Walkback (VW), on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN and CelebA datasets, demonstrating superior samples compared to earlier attempts to learn a transition operator. We also show that although each rapid training trajectory is limited to a finite but variable number of steps, our transition operator continues to generate good samples well past the length of such trajectories, thereby demonstrating the match of its non-equilibrium stationary distribution to the data distribution. Source

Review:
This paper proposes an extension of the information destruction/reconstruction processes introduced by Sohl-Dickstein et al. (i.e. NET). Specifically, the authors propose learning an explicit model for the information destroying process, as opposed to defining it a priori as repeated noising and rescaling. The authors also propose tying the parameters of the forwards/backwards processes, with the motivation of more efficiently seeking to eliminate spurious modes (kind of like contrastive divergence in undirected, energy-based models).
The general ideas explored in this paper are interesting -- i.e. training models which generate data through stochastic iterative refinement, and which provide mechanisms for "wandering around" the data manifold. However, the proposed model is a fairly straightforward extension of NET and does not produce compelling quantitative or qualitative results. The general perspective taken in this paper, i.e. reinterpreting the NET approach in the context of variational inference, was presented earlier in Section 2.3 of "Data Generation as Sequential Decision Making" by Bachman et al. (NIPS 2015). If more ambitious extensions of the ideas latent in NET were explored in this paper, I would really like it. But, I don't see that yet. And, e.g., the CIFAR10 results are roughly what one gets when simply modelling the data using a full-rank Gaussian distribution. This would make an interesting workshop paper, but I don't think there's enough strong content yet to fill a NIPS paper.