HEmile / storchastic

Stochastic Automatic Differentiation library for PyTorch.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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When is reparameterization allowed? #63

Open HEmile opened 4 years ago

HEmile commented 4 years ago

What are the precise conditions to allow reparameterization? It's likely not just that there is any differentiable path between a cost node and the stochastic node: A score function in between, for example, still gives an unbiased estimator! Furthermore, it should not be that there exists a differentiable path, but that all paths are differentiable: Otherwise, there could be behaviour that the reparameterization is missing.

Formalize these conditions and proof them.