We analyse the properties of an unbiased gradient estimator of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) for variational inference, based on the score function method with leave-one-out control variates. We show that this gradient estimator can be obtained using a new loss, defined as the variance of the log-ratio between the exact posterior and the variational approximation, which we call the log-variance loss. Under certain conditions, the gradient of the log-variance loss equals the gradient of the (negative) ELBO. We show theoretically that this gradient estimator, which we call VarGrad due to its connection to the log-variance loss, exhibits lower variance than the score function method in certain settings, and that the leave-one-out control variate coefficients are close to the optimal ones. We empirically demonstrate that VarGrad offers a favourable variance versus computation trade-off compared to other state-of-the-art estimators on a discrete variational autoencoder (VAE)
