Multi-modal Variational Encoder-Decoders

Recent advances in neural variational inference have facilitated efficient training of powerful directed graphical models with continuous latent variables, such as variational autoencoders. However, these models usually assume simple, uni-modal priors - such as the multivariate Gaussian distribution - yet many real-world data distributions are highly complex and multi-modal. Examples of complex and multi-modal distributions range from topics in newswire text to conversational dialogue responses. When such latent variable models are applied to these domains, the restriction of the simple, uni-modal prior hinders the overall expressivity of the learned model as it cannot possibly capture more complex aspects of the data distribution. To overcome this critical restriction, we propose a flexible, simple prior distribution which can be learned efficiently and potentially capture an exponential number of modes of a target distribution. We develop the multi-modal variational encoder-decoder framework and investigate the effectiveness of the proposed prior in several natural language processing modeling tasks, including document modeling and dialogue modeling.