Review for NeurIPS paper: Recursive Inference for Variational Autoencoders

Improving inference in VAEs is an area of wide interest and potentially high impact. The reviewers thought the paper was mostly well written and the approach sensible. The experimental results are encouraging, with RMIM outperforming quite a few baselines, though there were some potential issues with the experimental setup as explained below. The paper has substantial room for improvement however, with the reviewers making several good suggestions. For example, the derivation of the objective needs to be made clearer, including an explanation of how exactly it differs from the derivation in the BVI paper.