Jared Nielsen

Andrew Carr, Jared Nielsen, David Wingate

Neural Processes (NPs) are a class of models that learn a mapping from a context set of input-output pairs to a distribution over functions. They are traditionally trained using maximum likelihood with a KL divergence regularization term. We show that there are desirable classes of problems where NPs, with this loss, fail to learn any reasonable distribution. We also show that this drawback is solved by using approximations of Wasserstein distance which calculates optimal transport distances even for distributions of disjoint support. We give experimental justification for our method and demonstrate performance. These Wasserstein Neural Processes (WNPs) maintain all of the benefits of traditional NPs while being able to approximate a new class of function mappings.

Robert Pottorff, Jared Nielsen, David Wingate

We predict future video frames from complex dynamic scenes, using an invertible neural network as the encoder of a nonlinear dynamic system with latent linear state evolution. Our invertible linear embedding (ILE) demonstrates successful learning, prediction and latent state inference. In contrast to other approaches, ILE does not use any explicit reconstruction loss or simplistic pixel-space assumptions. Instead, it leverages invertibility to optimize the likelihood of image sequences exactly, albeit indirectly. Comparison with a state-of-the-art method demonstrates the viability of our approach.