Related papers: The LORACs prior for VAEs: Letting the Trees Speak…
The recently developed variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved to be an effective confluence of the rich representational power of neural networks with Bayesian methods. However, most work on VAEs use a rather simple prior over the…
We propose to learn a hierarchical prior in the context of variational autoencoders to avoid the over-regularisation resulting from a standard normal prior distribution. To incentivise an informative latent representation of the data, we…
Recently there has been an increased interest in unsupervised learning of disentangled representations using the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework. Most of the existing work has focused largely on modifying the variational cost…
Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) are capable of learning latent representations for high dimensional data. However, due to the i.i.d. assumption, VAEs only optimize the singleton variational distributions and fail to account for the…
We develop a generalisation of disentanglement in VAEs---decomposition of the latent representation---characterising it as the fulfilment of two factors: a) the latent encodings of the data having an appropriate level of overlap, and b) the…
The manifold hypothesis states that high-dimensional data can be modeled as lying on or near a low-dimensional, nonlinear manifold. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) approximate this manifold by learning mappings from low-dimensional latent…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are well-established as a principled approach to probabilistic unsupervised learning with neural networks. Typically, an encoder network defines the parameters of a Gaussian distributed latent space from…
We propose a family of novel hierarchical Bayesian deep auto-encoder models capable of identifying disentangled factors of variability in data. While many recent attempts at factor disentanglement have focused on sophisticated learning…
One of the major shortcomings of variational autoencoders is the inability to produce generations from the individual modalities of data originating from mixture distributions. This is primarily due to the use of a simple isotropic Gaussian…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been used extensively to discover low-dimensional latent factors governing neural activity and animal behavior. However, without careful model selection, the uncovered latent factors may reflect noise in…
Variational autoencoders often assume isotropic Gaussian priors and mean-field posteriors, hence do not exploit structure in scenarios where we may expect similarity or consistency across latent variables. Gaussian process variational…
Despite their ubiquity, variational autoencoders (VAEs) inherently suffer from posterior collapse, a failure mode in which latent variables are effectively ignored. This failure arises because explicit prior imposition drives optimization…
We explain why directly changing the prior can be a surprisingly ineffective mechanism for incorporating inductive biases into VAEs, and introduce a simple and effective alternative approach: Intermediary Latent Space VAEs(InteL-VAEs).…
Interpreting computations in the visual cortex as learning and inference in a generative model of the environment has received wide support both in neuroscience and cognitive science. However, hierarchical computations, a hallmark of visual…
This work develops problem statements related to encoders and autoencoders with the goal of elucidating variational formulations and establishing clear connections to information-theoretic concepts. Specifically, four problems with varying…
Unsupervised discovery of latent representations, in addition to being useful for density modeling, visualisation and exploratory data analysis, is also increasingly important for learning features relevant to discriminative tasks.…
We investigate the problem of learning representations that are invariant to certain nuisance or sensitive factors of variation in the data while retaining as much of the remaining information as possible. Our model is based on a…
The variational auto-encoder (VAE) is a popular method for learning a generative model and embeddings of the data. Many real datasets are hierarchically structured. However, traditional VAEs map data in a Euclidean latent space which cannot…
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful generative model that can estimate the probability of a data point by using latent variables. In the VAE, the posterior of the latent variable given the data point is regularized by the prior…
Recent advances in deep learning have shown their ability to learn strong feature representations for images. The task of image clustering naturally requires good feature representations to capture the distribution of the data and…