The flaws in the wake-sleep algorithm
• The recognition weights are trained to invert the
generative model in parts of the space where there is no
data.
– This is wasteful.
• The recognition weights follow the gradient of the wrong
divergence. They minimize  KL(P||Q) but the variational
bound requires minimization of KL(Q||P).
– This leads to incorrect mode-averaging
• The posterior over the top hidden layer is very far from
independent because the independent prior cannot
eliminate explaining away effects.