{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/differentiable-annealed-importance-sampling-1","title":"Differentiable Annealed Importance Sampling Minimizes The Symmetrized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Between Initial and Target Distribution","arxiv_id":"2405.14840","date":"2024-05-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Johannes Zenn","Robert Bamler"],"abstract":"Differentiable annealed importance sampling (DAIS), proposed by Geffner & Domke (2021) and Zhang et al. (2021), allows optimizing over the initial distribution of AIS. In this paper, we show that, in the limit of many transitions, DAIS minimizes the symmetrized Kullback-Leibler divergence between the initial and target distribution. Thus, DAIS can be seen as a form of variational inference (VI) as its initial distribution is a parametric fit to an intractable target distribution. We empirically evaluate the usefulness of the initial distribution as a variational distribution on synthetic and real-world data, observing that it often provides more accurate uncertainty estimates than VI (optimizing the reverse KL divergence), importance weighted VI, and Markovian score climbing (optimizing the forward KL divergence).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14840v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14840v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"differentiable-annealed-importance-sampling-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/jzenn/dais0","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"variational-inference","task_name":"Variational Inference"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"variational-inference","method_name":"Variational Inference"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2405.14840","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2405.14840"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/jzenn/dais0","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1,"ran_violates":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"4368a9d6070d9b1a","entry":"get_accuracy","repo":"jzenn/dais0","repo_kind":"official","path":"train_logistic_regression.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jzenn/dais0/blob/HEAD/train_logistic_regression.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"4368a9d6070d9b1a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"4cb6d71f93380cec","entry":"log_mean_exp","repo":"jzenn/dais0","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/sampling/dais.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jzenn/dais0/blob/HEAD/src/sampling/dais.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"4cb6d71f93380cec"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}