Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are expressive latent variable models that can be used to learn complex probability distributions from training data. However, the quality of the resulting model crucially relies on the expressiveness of the inference model used during training. We introduce Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB), a technique for training Variational Autoencoders with arbitrarily expressive inference models. We achieve this by introducing an auxiliary discriminative network that allows to rephrase the maximum-likelihood-problem as a two-player game, hence establishing a principled connection between VAEs and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We show that in the nonparametric limit our method yields an exact maximum-likelihood assignment for the parameters of the generative model, as well as the exact posterior distribution over the latent variables given an observation. Contrary to competing approaches which combine VAEs with GANs, our approach has a clear theoretical justification, retains most advantages of standard Variational Autoencoders and is easy to implement.

介绍了 Adversarial Variational Bayes 技术，可以用于训练具有任意表达力的推理模型的变分自编码器，并将其与生成对抗网络建立起了原则上的联系。

对抗变分贝叶斯：统一变分自编码器和生成对抗网络