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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Brekelmans, Rob, Masrani, Vaden, Bui, Thang, Wood, Frank, Galstyan, Aram, Steeg, Greg Ver, Nielsen, Frank
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07823
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Table of Contents:
  • Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is the gold standard for estimating partition functions or marginal likelihoods, corresponding to importance sampling over a path of distributions between a tractable base and an unnormalized target. While AIS yields an unbiased estimator for any path, existing literature has been primarily limited to the geometric mixture or moment-averaged paths associated with the exponential family and KL divergence. We explore AIS using $q$-paths, which include the geometric path as a special case and are related to the homogeneous power mean, deformed exponential family, and $α$-divergence.