Reviews: A New Distribution on the Simplex with Auto-Encoding Applications

Originality: Although VAEs using a stick-breaking construction with Kumaraswamy distributions has been considered before (Nalisnick, Smyth, STICK-BREAKING VARIATIONAL AUTOENCODERS, 2017), the idea to use such a construction and extend it by mixing over the orderings to obtain a density more similar to a Dirichlet is new and interesting. Related work is adequately cited. Quality: The paper seems technically sound and claims are largely supported. Although Theorem 1 is a standard result, reiterating it is likely useful for the subsequent exposition. Experimental results show that the method outperforms some baselines, however, I feel that some additional experiments would be useful (see details below in Section 5. Improvements).