Gradient Estimation for Binary Latent Variables via Gradient Variance Clipping

Gradient estimation is often necessary for fitting generative models with discrete latent variables, in contexts such as reinforcement learning and variational autoencoder (VAE) training. The DisARM estimator (Yin et al. 2020; Dong, Mnih, and Tucker 2020) achieves state of the art gradient variance for Bernoulli latent variable models in many contexts. However, DisARM and other estimators have potentially exploding variance near the boundary of the parameter space, where solutions tend to lie. To ameliorate this issue, we propose a new gradient estimator bitflip-1 that has lower variance at the boundaries of the parameter space. As bitflip-1 has complementary properties to existing estimators, we introduce an aggregated estimator, unbiased gradient variance clipping (UGC) that uses either a bitflip-1 or a DisARM gradient update for each coordinate. We theoretically prove that UGC has uniformly lower variance than DisARM. Empirically, we observe that UGC achieves the optimal value of the optimization objectives in toy experiments, discrete VAE training, and in a best subset selection problem.