UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Grammar variational autoencoder

Kusner, MJ; Paige, B; Hemández-Lobato, JM; (2017) Grammar variational autoencoder. In: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. (pp. pp. 1945-1954). PMLR: Sydney, Australia. Green open access

[thumbnail of Kusner_VoRkusner17a.pdf]
Preview
Text
Kusner_VoRkusner17a.pdf - Published Version

Download (902kB) | Preview

Abstract

Deep generative models have been wildly successful at learning coherent latent representations for continuous data such as natural images, artwork, and audio. However, generative modeling of discrete data such as arithmetic expressions and molecular structures still poses significant challenges. Crucially, state-of-the-art methods often produce outputs that are not valid. We make the key observation that frequently, discrete data can be represented as a parse tree from a context-free grammar. We propose a variational autoencoder which directly encodes from and decodes to these parse trees, ensuring the generated outputs are always syntactically valid. Surprisingly, we show that not only does our model more often generate valid outputs, it also learns a more coherent latent space in which nearby points decode to similar discrete outputs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned models by showing their improved performance in Bayesian optimization for symbolic regression and molecule generation.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Grammar variational autoencoder
Event: 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2017
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10088323
Downloads since deposit
39Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item