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Main Authors: Li, Yangming, Cheng, Yixin, van der Schaar, Mihaela
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14021
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author Li, Yangming
Cheng, Yixin
van der Schaar, Mihaela
author_facet Li, Yangming
Cheng, Yixin
van der Schaar, Mihaela
contents Latent diffusion has demonstrated promising results in image generation and permits efficient sampling. However, this framework might suffer from the problem of posterior collapse when applied to time series. In this paper, we first show that posterior collapse will reduce latent diffusion to a variational autoencoder (VAE), making it less expressive. This highlights the importance of addressing this issue. We then introduce a principled method: dependency measure, that quantifies the sensitivity of a recurrent decoder to input variables. Using this tool, we confirm that posterior collapse significantly affects time-series latent diffusion on real datasets, and a phenomenon termed dependency illusion is also discovered in the case of shuffled time series. Finally, building on our theoretical and empirical studies, we introduce a new framework that extends latent diffusion and has a stable posterior. Extensive experiments on multiple real time-series datasets show that our new framework is free from posterior collapse and significantly outperforms previous baselines in time series synthesis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Study of Posterior Stability for Time-Series Latent Diffusion
Li, Yangming
Cheng, Yixin
van der Schaar, Mihaela
Machine Learning
Latent diffusion has demonstrated promising results in image generation and permits efficient sampling. However, this framework might suffer from the problem of posterior collapse when applied to time series. In this paper, we first show that posterior collapse will reduce latent diffusion to a variational autoencoder (VAE), making it less expressive. This highlights the importance of addressing this issue. We then introduce a principled method: dependency measure, that quantifies the sensitivity of a recurrent decoder to input variables. Using this tool, we confirm that posterior collapse significantly affects time-series latent diffusion on real datasets, and a phenomenon termed dependency illusion is also discovered in the case of shuffled time series. Finally, building on our theoretical and empirical studies, we introduce a new framework that extends latent diffusion and has a stable posterior. Extensive experiments on multiple real time-series datasets show that our new framework is free from posterior collapse and significantly outperforms previous baselines in time series synthesis.
title A Study of Posterior Stability for Time-Series Latent Diffusion
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14021