Computing gradients of an expectation with respect to the distributional
parameters of a discrete distribution is a problem arising in many fields of
science and engineering. Typically, this problem is tackled using Reinforce,
which frames the problem of gradient estimation as a Monte Carlo simulation.
Unfortunately, the Reinforce estimator is especially sensitive to discrepancies
between the true probability distribution and the drawn samples, a common issue
in low sampling regimes that results in inaccurate gradient estimates. In this
paper, we introduce DBsurf, a reinforce-based estimator for discrete
distributions that uses a novel sampling procedure to reduce the discrepancy
between the samples and the actual distribution. To assess the performance of
our estimator, we subject it to a diverse set of tasks. Among existing
estimators, DBsurf attains the lowest variance in a least squares problem
commonly used in the literature for benchmarking. Furthermore, DBsurf achieves
the best results for training variational auto-encoders (VAE) across different
datasets and sampling setups. Finally, we apply DBsurf to build a simple and
efficient Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm with state-of-the-art
performance.

介绍了一种基于 Reinforce 的离散分布估计方法 DBsurf，通过减少样本与实际分布之间的偏差来提高梯度估计的准确性，达到在不同数据集和采样设置下实现最佳结果的训练变分自动编码器（VAE）及构建具有最新性能的简单高效的神经架构搜索（NAS）算法。