  Convolutional architectures have recently been shown to be competitive on
many sequence modelling tasks when compared to the de-facto standard of
recurrent neural networks (RNNs), while providing computational and modeling
advantages due to inherent parallelism. However, currently there remains a
performance gap to more expressive stochastic RNN variants, especially those
with several layers of dependent random variables. In this work, we propose
stochastic temporal convolutional networks (STCNs), a novel architecture that
combines the computational advantages of temporal convolutional networks (TCN)
with the representational power and robustness of stochastic latent spaces. In
particular, we propose a hierarchy of stochastic latent variables that captures
temporal dependencies at different time-scales. The architecture is modular and
flexible due to the decoupling of the deterministic and stochastic layers. We
show that the proposed architecture achieves state of the art log-likelihoods
across several tasks. Finally, the model is capable of predicting high-quality
synthetic samples over a long-range temporal horizon in modeling of handwritten
text.
