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Sliced Score Matching: A Scalable Approach to Density and Score Estimation (arxiv.org)
1 point by sel1 on Jun 28, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Estimating an unnormalized probability shape usually means matching its slope field, but that needs costly second derivatives. Projecting slopes onto random directions before comparing makes the math cheap, letting deep models handle high-dimensional data where the usual approach breaks down.

Abstract

Score matching is a popular method for estimating unnormalized statistical models. However, it has been so far limited to simple, shallow models or low-dimensional data, due to the difficulty of computing the Hessian of log-density functions. We show this difficulty can be mitigated by projecting the scores onto random vectors before comparing them. This objective, called sliced score matching, only involves Hessian-vector products, which can be easily implemented using reverse-mode automatic differentiation. Therefore, sliced score matching is amenable to more complex models and higher dimensional data compared to score matching. Theoretically, we prove the consistency and asymptotic normality of sliced score matching estimators. Moreover, we demonstrate that sliced score matching can be used to learn deep score estimators for implicit distributions. In our experiments, we show sliced score matching can learn deep energy-based models effectively, and can produce accurate score estimates for applications such as variational inference with implicit distributions and training Wasserstein Auto-Encoders.

Yang Song, Sahaj Garg, Jiaxin Shi, Stefano Ermon
arXiv:1905.07088 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted May 17, 2019 · updated Jun 27, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · UAI 2019

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