Jorn-Henrik Jacobsen

1paper

1 Paper

MLFeb 13, 2020
Learning the Stein Discrepancy for Training and Evaluating Energy-Based Models without Sampling

Will Grathwohl, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Jorn-Henrik Jacobsen et al.

We present a new method for evaluating and training unnormalized density models. Our approach only requires access to the gradient of the unnormalized model's log-density. We estimate the Stein discrepancy between the data density $p(x)$ and the model density $q(x)$ defined by a vector function of the data. We parameterize this function with a neural network and fit its parameters to maximize the discrepancy. This yields a novel goodness-of-fit test which outperforms existing methods on high dimensional data. Furthermore, optimizing $q(x)$ to minimize this discrepancy produces a novel method for training unnormalized models which scales more gracefully than existing methods. The ability to both learn and compare models is a unique feature of the proposed method.