  Topic models are one of the most popular methods for learning representations
of text, but a major challenge is that any change to the topic model requires
mathematically deriving a new inference algorithm. A promising approach to
address this problem is autoencoding variational Bayes (AEVB), but it has
proven diffi- cult to apply to topic models in practice. We present what is to
our knowledge the first effective AEVB based inference method for latent
Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which we call Autoencoded Variational Inference For
Topic Model (AVITM). This model tackles the problems caused for AEVB by the
Dirichlet prior and by component collapsing. We find that AVITM matches
traditional methods in accuracy with much better inference time. Indeed,
because of the inference network, we find that it is unnecessary to pay the
computational cost of running variational optimization on test data. Because
AVITM is black box, it is readily applied to new topic models. As a dramatic
illustration of this, we present a new topic model called ProdLDA, that
replaces the mixture model in LDA with a product of experts. By changing only
one line of code from LDA, we find that ProdLDA yields much more interpretable
topics, even if LDA is trained via collapsed Gibbs sampling.
