Implicit maximum likelihood estimates

An ‘Og’s reader pointed me to this paper by Li and Malik, which made it to arXiv after not making it to NIPS. While the NIPS reviews were not particularly informative and strongly discordant, the authors point out in the comments that they are available for the sake of promoting discussion. (As made clear in earlier posts, I am quite supportive of this attitude! Disclaimer: I was not involved in an evaluation of this paper, neither for NIPS nor for another conference or journal!!) Although the paper does not seem to mention ABC in the setting of implicit likelihoods and generative models, there is a reference to the early (1984) paper by Peter Diggle and Richard Gratton that is often seen as the ancestor of ABC methods. The authors point out numerous issues with solutions proposed for parameter estimation in such implicit models. For instance, for GANs, they signal that “minimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence or the Wasserstein distance between the empirical data distribution and the model distribution does not necessarily minimize the same between the true data distribution and the model distribution.” (Not mentioning the particular difficulty with Bayesian GANs.) Their own solution is the implicit maximum likelihood estimator, which picks the value of the parameter θ bringing a simulated sample the closest to the observed sample. Closest in the sense of the Euclidean distance between both samples. Or between the minimum of several simulated samples and the observed sample. (The modelling seems to imply the availability of n>1 observed samples.) They advocate using a stochastic gradient descent approach for finding the optimal parameter θ which presupposes that the dependence between θ and the simulated samples is somewhat differentiable. (And this does not account for using a min, which would make differentiation close to impossible.) The paper then meanders in a lengthy discussion as to whether maximising the likelihood makes sense, with a rather naïve view on why using the empirical distribution in a Kullback-Leibler divergence does not make sense! What does not make sense is considering the finite sample approximation to the Kullback-Leibler divergence with the true distribution in my opinion.