Papers › Iterative Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE-k)

Iterative Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE-k)

5 Jun 2014arXiv:1406.1485archive 2025-07-28

Tapani Raiko, Li Yao, Kyunghyun Cho, Yoshua Bengio

Training of the neural autoregressive density estimator (NADE) can be viewed as doing one step of probabilistic inference on missing values in data. We propose a new model that extends this inference scheme to multiple steps, arguing that it is easier to learn to improve a reconstruction in k steps rather than to learn to reconstruct in a single inference step. The proposed model is an unsupervised building block for deep learning that combines the desirable properties of NADE and multi-predictive training: (1) Its test likelihood can be computed analytically, (2) it is easy to generate independent samples from it, and (3) it uses an inference engine that is a superset of variational inference for Boltzmann machines. The proposed NADE-k is competitive with the state-of-the-art in density estimation on the two datasets tested.

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yaoli/nade_k mentioned on GitHub report

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Tasks

Density EstimationImage GenerationMissing ValuesVariational Inference

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Generation Binarized MNIST EoNADE-5 2hl (128 orders) nats 84.68 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

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