Reviews: Using Large Ensembles of Control Variates for Variational Inference

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I have read the other reviews and the rebuttal, and after discussing the work I am electing to keep my score the same. I am somewhat unsatisfied by the author response; for papers where gradient estimator efficiency (in terms of variance) is in service of the optimization problem, comparing ELBO traces by iteration can be very misleading. If the machinery you introduce to efficiently use an ensemble of control variates is not very costly, then it should be measured or shown in your experiments. My comments below weren't about optimal tuning, they were more about exploring/understanding the sensitivity of their method on the parameters they introduce.