minimax game
Bounds all around: training energy-based models with bidirectional bounds
Energy-based models (EBMs) provide an elegant framework for density estimation, but they are notoriously difficult to train. Recent work has established links to generative adversarial networks, where the EBM is trained through a minimax game with a variational value function. We propose a bidirectional bound on the EBM log-likelihood, such that we maximize a lower bound and minimize an upper bound when solving the minimax game. We link one bound to a gradient penalty that stabilizes training, thereby provide grounding for best engineering practice. To evaluate the bounds we develop a new and efficient estimator of the Jacobi-determinant of the EBM generator. We demonstrate that these developments stabilize training and yield high-quality density estimation and sample generation.
Adversarial Jamming for Autoencoder Distribution Matching
El-Geresy, Waleed, Gรผndรผz, Deniz
We propose the use of adversarial wireless jamming to regularise the latent space of an autoencoder to match a diagonal Gaussian distribution. We consider the minimisation of a mean squared error distortion, where a jammer attempts to disrupt the recovery of a Gaussian source encoded and transmitted over the adversarial channel. A straightforward consequence of existing theoretical results is the fact that the saddle point of a minimax game - involving such an encoder, its corresponding decoder, and an adversarial jammer - consists of diagonal Gaussian noise output by the jammer. We use this result as inspiration for a novel approach to distribution matching in the latent space, utilising jamming as an auxiliary objective to encourage the aggregated latent posterior to match a diagonal Gaussian distribution. Using this new technique, we achieve distribution matching comparable to standard variational autoencoders and to Wasserstein autoencoders. This approach can also be generalised to other latent distributions.