Timezone: »

 
Oral
Latent Normalizing Flows for Discrete Sequences
Zachary Ziegler · Alexander Rush

Thu Jun 13 09:25 AM -- 09:30 AM (PDT) @ Hall A
in Deep Generative Models »

Normalizing flows have been shown to be a powerful class of generative models for continuous random variables, giving both strong performance and the potential for non-autoregressive generation. These benefits are also desired when modeling discrete random variables such as text, but directly applying normalizing flows to discrete sequences poses significant additional challenges. We propose a generative model which jointly learns a normalizing flow-based distribution in the latent space and a stochastic mapping to an observed discrete space. In this setting, we find that it is crucial for the flow-based distribution to be highly multimodal. To capture this property, we propose several normalizing flow architectures to maximize model flexibility. Experiments consider common discrete sequence tasks of character-level language modeling and polyphonic music generation. Our results indicate that an autoregressive flow-based model can match the performance of a comparable autoregressive baseline, and a non-autoregressive flow-based model can improve generation speed with a penalty to performance.

[ Slides] 

Author Information

Zachary Ziegler (Harvard University)
Alexander Rush (Harvard University)

Related Events (a corresponding poster, oral, or spotlight)

More from the Same Authors