title: Multi-modal Variational Encoder-Decoders
abstract: Recent advances in neural variational inference have facilitated efficient training of powerful directed graphical models with continuous latent variables, such as variational autoencoders. However, these models usually assume simple, uni-modal priors — such as the multivariate Gaussian distribution — yet many real-world data distributions are highly complex and multi-modal. Examples of complex and multi-modal distributions range from topics in newswire text to conversational dialogue responses. When such latent variable models are applied to these domains, the restriction of the simple, uni-modal prior hinders the overall expressivity of the learned model as it cannot possibly capture more complex aspects of the data distribution. To overcome this critical restriction, we propose a flexible, simple prior distribution which can be learned efficiently and potentially capture an exponential number of modes of a target distribution. We develop the multi-modal variational encoder-decoder framework and investigate the effectiveness of the proposed prior in several natural language processing modeling tasks, including document modeling and dialogue modeling.
authors: Iulian V. Serban Alexander G. Ororbia II Joelle Pineau Aaron Courville
hIndex: Aaron Courville 79