Thank you for your detailed reviews and comments. Wehope our clarifications, which we will include in the final1 version of the paper, will strengthen your confidence in the novelty and significance of our results. Both speed up DPP sampling given a polynomial time pre-processing step.

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) provide an elegant and versatile way to sample sets of items that balance the point-wise quality with the set-wise diversity of selected items. For this reason, they have gained prominence in many machine learning applications that rely on subset selection. However, sampling from a DPP over a ground set of size N is a costly operation, requiring in general an O(N^3) preprocessing cost and an O(Nk^3) sampling cost for subsets of size k. We approach this problem by introducing DppNets: generative deep models that produce DPP-like samples for arbitrary ground sets. We develop an inhibitive attention mechanism based on transformer networks that captures a notion of dissimilarity between feature vectors. We show theoretically that such an approximation is sensible as it maintains the guarantees of inhibition or dissimilarity that makes DPPs so powerful and unique. Empirically, we show across multiple datasets that DPPNET is orders of magnitude faster than competing approaches for DPP sampling, while generating high-likelihood samples and performing as well as DPPs on downstream tasks.

This work focuses on sampling determinantal point processes (DPPs) by utilizing deep learning architecture so that the running time for sampling becomes faster than the standard DPP sampling. To avoid complex operations (e.g., matrix inversion or eigendecomposition) used in the standard DPP sampling, authors come up with an attention mechanism where it simply needs to dot-product of features or kernel matrix itself. As far as I know, most of the prior works in deep learning community borrow DPPs and apply them at the top of layer in the network for the purpose of generalization, compression and so on. Unlike the priors, this work utilizes deep learning models in order to simplify the DPP sampling. This can be a great impact for future works of other models whose inputs are a subset of items and guide them to capture their characteristic (e.g., ranking) using deep learning architectures.

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) provide an elegant and versatile way to sample sets of items that balance the point-wise quality with the set-wise diversity of selected items. For this reason, they have gained prominence in many machine learning applications that rely on subset selection. However, sampling from a DPP over a ground set of size N is a costly operation, requiring in general an O(N 3) preprocessing cost and an O(Nk 3) sampling cost for subsets of size k. We approach this problem by introducing DppNets: generative deep models that produce DPP-like samples for arbitrary ground sets. We develop an inhibitive attention mechanism based on transformer networks that captures a notion of dissimilarity between feature vectors. We show theoretically that such an approximation is sensible as it maintains the guarantees of inhibition or dissimilarity that makes DPPs so powerful and unique.

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) provide an elegant and versatile way to sample sets of items that balance the point-wise quality with the set-wise diversity of selected items. For this reason, they have gained prominence in many machine learning applications that rely on subset selection. However, sampling from a DPP over a ground set of size N is a costly operation, requiring in general an O(N 3) preprocessing cost and an O(Nk 3) sampling cost for subsets of size k. We approach this problem by introducing DppNets: generative deep models that produce DPP-like samples for arbitrary ground sets. We develop an inhibitive attention mechanism based on transformer networks that captures a notion of dissimilarity between feature vectors.

Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) provide an elegant and versatile way to sample sets of items that balance the point-wise quality with the set-wise diversity of selected items. For this reason, they have gained prominence in many machine learning applications that rely on subset selection. However, sampling from a DPP over a ground set of size $N$ is a costly operation, requiring in general an $O(N^3)$ preprocessing cost and an $O(Nk^3)$ sampling cost for subsets of size $k$. We approach this problem by introducing DPPNets: generative deep models that produce DPP-like samples for arbitrary ground sets. We develop an inhibitive attention mechanism based on transformer networks that captures a notion of dissimilarity between feature vectors. We show theoretically that such an approximation is sensible as it maintains the guarantees of inhibition or dissimilarity that makes DPPs so powerful and unique. Empirically, we demonstrate that samples from our model receive high likelihood under the more expensive DPP alternative.