The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has proven to be an effective model for producing semantically meaningful latent representations for natural data. However, it has thus far seen limited application to sequential data, and, as we demonstrate, existing recurrent VAE models have difficulty modeling sequences with long-term structure. To address this issue, we propose the use of a hierarchical decoder, which first outputs embeddings for subsequences of the input and then uses these embeddings to generate each subsequence independently. This structure encourages the model to utilize its latent code, thereby avoiding the "posterior collapse" problem which remains an issue for recurrent VAEs. We apply this architecture to modeling sequences of musical notes and find that it exhibits dramatically better sampling, interpolation, and reconstruction performance than a "flat" baseline model. An implementation of our "MusicVAE" is available online at this http URL
Various additional VAE models with autoregressive decoders have also been proposed. @cite_3 consider extensions of the recurrent VAE where the RNNs are replaced with feed-forward and convolutional networks. The PixelVAE @cite_16 marries a VAE with a PixelCNN @cite_33 and applies the result to the task of natural image modeling. Similarly, the Variational Lossy Autoencoder @cite_30 combines a VAE with a PixelCNN PixelRNN decoder. The authors also consider limiting the power of the decoder and using a more expressive Inverse Autoregressive Flow @cite_25 prior on the latent codes. Another example of a VAE with a recurrent encoder and decoder is SketchRNN @cite_21 , which successfully models sequences of continuously-valued pen coordinates.
@cite_30 @cite_33 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_16 @cite_25
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Natural image modeling is a landmark challenge of unsupervised learning. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) learn a useful latent representation and model global structure well but have difficulty capturing small details. PixelCNN models details very well, but lacks a latent code and is difficult to scale for capturing large structures. We present PixelVAE, a VAE model with an autoregressive decoder based on PixelCNN. Our model requires very few expensive autoregressive layers compared to PixelCNN and learns latent codes that are more compressed than a standard VAE while still capturing most non-trivial structure. Finally, we extend our model to a hierarchy of latent variables at different scales. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on binarized MNIST, competitive performance on 64x64 ImageNet, and high-quality samples on the LSUN bedrooms dataset. The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has proven to be an effective model for producing semantically meaningful latent representations for natural data. However, it has thus far seen limited application to sequential data, and, as we demonstrate, existing recurrent VAE models have difficulty modeling sequences with long-term structure. To address this issue, we propose the use of a hierarchical decoder, which first outputs embeddings for subsequences of the input and then uses these embeddings to generate each subsequence independently. This structure encourages the model to utilize its latent code, thereby avoiding the "posterior collapse" problem which remains an issue for recurrent VAEs. We apply this architecture to modeling sequences of musical notes and find that it exhibits dramatically better sampling, interpolation, and reconstruction performance than a "flat" baseline model. An implementation of our "MusicVAE" is available online at this http URL In this paper we explore the effect of architectural choices on learning a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for text generation. In contrast to the previously introduced VAE model for text where both the encoder and decoder are RNNs, we propose a novel hybrid architecture that blends fully feed-forward convolutional and deconvolutional components with a recurrent language model. Our architecture exhibits several attractive properties such as faster run time and convergence, ability to better handle long sequences and, more importantly, it helps to avoid some of the major difficulties posed by training VAE models on textual data. Learning useful representations without supervision remains a key challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful generative model that learns such discrete representations. Our model, the Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE), differs from VAEs in two key ways: the encoder network outputs discrete, rather than continuous, codes; and the prior is learnt rather than static. In order to learn a discrete latent representation, we incorporate ideas from vector quantisation (VQ). Using the VQ method allows the model to circumvent issues of posterior collapse'' -— where the latents are ignored when they are paired with a powerful autoregressive decoder -— typically observed in the VAE framework. Pairing these representations with an autoregressive prior, the model can generate high quality images, videos, and speech as well as doing high quality speaker conversion and unsupervised learning of phonemes, providing further evidence of the utility of the learnt representations.