Reviews: Reparameterization Gradient for Non-differentiable Models

EDITED AFTER REBUTTAL PERIOD: The rebuttal addresses concerns 3 and 4. I like the plots in Figure 1' and suggest to include them in the paper, together with table 2'. Regarding concerns 1 and 2, I disagree with the authors' rebuttal in that Gumble-softmax (and related) approaches are "orthogonal" to the paper. As noted in the rebuttal, any model with categorical variables can be rewritten in terms of if/else statements. That is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my initial review, which is why I suggested to include an experiment involving a model with categorical latent variables. In this paper, a VI stochastic gradient estimator for non-differentiable models is proposed.