How can we learn to do probabilistic inference in a way that generalizes between models? Amortized variational inference learns for a single model, sharing statistical strength across observations. This benefits scalability and model learning, but does not help with generalization to new models. We propose meta-amortized variational inference, a framework that amortizes the cost of inference over a family of generative models. We apply this approach to deep generative models by introducing the MetaVAE: a variational autoencoder that learns to generalize to new distributions and rapidly solve new unsupervised learning problems using only a small number of target examples. Empirically, we validate the approach by showing that the MetaVAE can: (1) capture relevant sufficient statistics for inference, (2) learn useful representations of data for downstream tasks such as clustering, and (3) perform meta-density estimation on unseen synthetic distributions and out-of-sample Omniglot alphabets.

本文提出了一种双重摊销变分推理过程来解决传统推理技术训练的生成模型在适应新分布时遇到的困难，通过学习可转移潜在表示，在不同的概率模型之间推广，特别地，应用于图像分布上，该方法在 MNIST 和 NORB 的下游图像分类任务中显著优于基线（分别达 10-50% 和 10-35% 的准确率提升）

元摊分变分推断与学习