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Srinivas Vasudevan

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2 papers
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2

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

MCMC Should Mix: Learning Energy-Based Model with Neural Transport Latent Space MCMC

  • Erik Nijkamp
  • Ruiqi Gao
  • Pavel Sountsov
  • Srinivas Vasudevan
  • Bo Pang 0004
  • Song-Chun Zhu
  • Ying Nian Wu

Learning energy-based model (EBM) requires MCMC sampling of the learned model as an inner loop of the learning algorithm. However, MCMC sampling of EBMs in high-dimensional data space is generally not mixing, because the energy function, which is usually parametrized by deep network, is highly multi-modal in the data space. This is a serious handicap for both theory and practice of EBMs. In this paper, we propose to learn EBM with a flow-based model (or in general latent variable model) serving as a backbone, so that the EBM is a correction or an exponential tilting of the flow-based model. We show that the model has a particularly simple form in the space of the latent variables of the generative model, and MCMC sampling of the EBM in the latent space mixes well and traverses modes in the data space. This enables proper sampling and learning of EBMs.

NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Simple, Distributed, and Accelerated Probabilistic Programming

  • Dustin Tran
  • Matthew Hoffman
  • Dave Moore
  • Christopher Suter
  • Srinivas Vasudevan
  • Alexey Radul

We describe a simple, low-level approach for embedding probabilistic programming in a deep learning ecosystem. In particular, we distill probabilistic programming down to a single abstraction—the random variable. Our lightweight implementation in TensorFlow enables numerous applications: a model-parallel variational auto-encoder (VAE) with 2nd-generation tensor processing units (TPUv2s); a data-parallel autoregressive model (Image Transformer) with TPUv2s; and multi-GPU No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS). For both a state-of-the-art VAE on 64x64 ImageNet and Image Transformer on 256x256 CelebA-HQ, our approach achieves an optimal linear speedup from 1 to 256 TPUv2 chips. With NUTS, we see a 100x speedup on GPUs over Stan and 37x over PyMC3.

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