Related papers: Tighter Variational Bounds are Not Necessarily Bet…

The variational auto-encoder (VAE) is a deep latent variable model that has two neural networks in an autoencoder-like architecture; one of them parameterizes the model's likelihood. Fitting its parameters via maximum likelihood (ML) is…

We present Quantized Variational Inference, a new algorithm for Evidence Lower Bound maximization. We show how Optimal Voronoi Tesselation produces variance free gradients for ELBO optimization at the cost of introducing asymptotically…

Bayesian neural networks perform variational inference over the weights however calculation of the posterior distribution remains a challenge. Our work builds on variational inference techniques for bayesian neural networks using the…

In this paper we propose two novel bounds for the log-likelihood based on Kullback-Leibler and the R\'{e}nyi divergences, which can be used for variational inference and in particular for the training of Variational AutoEncoders. Our…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be remarkably effective in recovering model latent spaces for several computer vision tasks. However, currently trained VAEs, for a number of reasons, seem to fall short in learning…

Real world datasets often contain entries with missing elements e.g. in a medical dataset, a patient is unlikely to have taken all possible diagnostic tests. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are popular generative models often used for…

Multimodal variational autoencoders have demonstrated their ability to learn the relationships between different modalities by mapping them into a latent representation. Their design and capacity to perform any-to-any conditional and…

Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational free energy (F) in neuroscience (ELBO = -F). While this…

The marginal likelihood, also known as the evidence, is regarded as a mathematical embodiment of Occam's razor, enabling model selection that avoids overfitting. The evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective from variational inference has also…

The central objective function of a variational autoencoder (VAE) is its variational lower bound (the ELBO). Here we show that for standard (i.e., Gaussian) VAEs the ELBO converges to a value given by the sum of three entropies: the…

This paper introduces novel results for the score function gradient estimator of the importance weighted variational bound (IWAE). We prove that in the limit of large $K$ (number of importance samples) one can choose the control variate…

Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) are deep generative latent variable models consisting of two components: a generative model that captures a data distribution p(x) by transforming a distribution p(z) over latent space, and an inference…

Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference with a…

Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational…

While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have experienced recent success as data-generating models by using simple architectures that do not require significant fine-tuning of hyperparameters. However, VAEs are known to suffer from…

Training deep generative models with maximum likelihood remains a challenge. The typical workaround is to use variational inference (VI) and maximize a lower bound to the log marginal likelihood of the data. Variational auto-encoders (VAEs)…

A new form of variational autoencoder (VAE) is developed, in which the joint distribution of data and codes is considered in two (symmetric) forms: ($i$) from observed data fed through the encoder to yield codes, and ($ii$) from latent…

Variational Graph Auto-Encoders (VGAEs) have been widely used to solve the node clustering task. However, the state-of-the-art methods have numerous challenges. First, existing VGAEs do not account for the discrepancy between the inference…

We extend variational autoencoders (VAEs) to collaborative filtering for implicit feedback. This non-linear probabilistic model enables us to go beyond the limited modeling capacity of linear factor models which still largely dominate…