Reading Assignment 4: Sigmoid Belief Nets & Deep Generative Networks

Chapter 20.9 on how to do back-propagation through random operations (5 pages)

• reparametrization trick
• why this trick is not applicable to discrete stochastic operations

Also have a look at Kingma & Welling’s workshop slides at NIPS 2015 (slides 11-14)

Chapter 20.10-20.10.2 on fully directed generative networks and differentiable generator nets (4 pages)

• structure and (at least one) method of training Sigmoid Belief Nets
• concept of differentiable generator nets and how reparametrization trick is related