Conditional Generative Moment-Matching Networks

Abstract

Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has been successfully applied to learn deep generative models for characterizing a joint distribution of variables via kernel mean embedding. In this paper, we present conditional generative moment-matching networks (CGMMN), which learn a conditional distribution given some input variables based on a conditional maximum mean discrepancy (CMMD) criterion. The learning is performed by stochastic gradient descent with the gradient calculated by back-propagation. We evaluate CGMMN on a wide range of tasks, including predictive modeling, contextual generation, and Bayesian dark knowledge, which distills knowledge from a Bayesian model by learning a relatively small CGMMN student network. Our results demonstrate competitive performance in all the tasks.