Tighter Variational Bounds are Not Necessarily Better

Tom Rainforth, Adam R. Kosiorek, Tuan Anh Le, Chris J. Maddison, Maximilian Igl, Frank Wood, Yee Whye Teh

Abstract: We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise rat...