Reinterpreting Importance-Weighted Autoencoders

Abstract

The standard interpretation of importance-weighted autoencoders is that they maximize a tighter lower bound on the marginal likelihood than the standard evidence lower bound. We give an alternate interpretation of this procedure: that it optimizes the standard variational lower bound, but using a more complex distribution. We formally derive this result, present a tighter lower bound, and visualize the implicit importance-weighted distribution.