English
Related papers

Related papers: Preventing Posterior Collapse with delta-VAEs

200 papers

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one of the powerful unsupervised learning frameworks in NLP for latent representation learning and latent-directed generation. The classic optimization goal of VAEs is to maximize the Evidence Lower Bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Jianfei Zhang , Jun Bai , Chenghua Lin , Yanmeng Wang , Wenge Rong

The posterior collapse phenomenon in variational autoencoder (VAE), where the variational posterior distribution closely matches the prior distribution, can hinder the quality of the learned latent variables. As a consequence of posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-14 Hien Dang , Tho Tran , Tan Nguyen , Nhat Ho

Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) provide a means to generate representational latent embeddings. Previous research has highlighted the benefits of achieving representations that are disentangled, particularly for downstream tasks. However,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-11-18 Matthew J. Vowels , Necati Cihan Camgoz , Richard Bowden

We take steps towards understanding the "posterior collapse (PC)" difficulty in variational autoencoders (VAEs),~i.e. a degenerate optimum in which the latent codes become independent of their corresponding inputs. We rely on calculus of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Octavian-Eugen Ganea , Yashas Annadani , Gary Bécigneul

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) combine latent variables with amortized variational inference, whose optimization usually converges into a trivial local optimum termed posterior collapse, especially in text modeling. By tracking the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Chen Wu , Prince Zizhuang Wang , William Yang Wang

We investigate the phenomenon of posterior collapse in variational autoencoders (VAEs) from the perspective of statistical physics, and reveal that it constitutes a phase transition governed jointly by data structure and model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Zhen Li , Fan Zhang , Zheng Zhang , Yu Chen

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely applied for text modeling. In practice, however, they are troubled by two challenges: information underrepresentation and posterior collapse. The former arises as only the last hidden state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Xianghong Fang , Haoli Bai , Jian Li , Zenglin Xu , Michael Lyu , Irwin King

Variational Autoencoders and their many variants have displayed impressive ability to perform dimensionality reduction, often achieving state-of-the-art performance. Many current methods however, struggle to learn good representations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Navindu Leelarathna , Andrei Margeloiu , Mateja Jamnik , Nikola Simidjievski

Data-driven reduced-order models based on autoencoders generally lack interpretability compared to classical methods such as the proper orthogonal decomposition. More interpretability can be gained by disentangling the latent variables and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Henning Schwarz , Pyei Phyo Lin , Jens-Peter M. Zemke , Thomas Rung

Powerful generative models, particularly in Natural Language Modelling, are commonly trained by maximizing a variational lower bound on the data log likelihood. These models often suffer from poor use of their latent variable, with ad-hoc…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-13 Alex Mansbridge , Roberto Fierimonte , Ilya Feige , David Barber

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-12 Jan Stühmer , Richard E. Turner , Sebastian Nowozin

Variational autoencoders employ an amortized inference model to approximate the posterior of latent variables. However, such amortized variational inference faces two challenges: (1) the limited posterior expressiveness of fully-factorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Yookoon Park , Chris Dongjoo Kim , Gunhee Kim

We show that posterior collapse in $\beta$-VAEs implements automatic spectral pruning. A latent mode collapses if its contribution to reconstruction is below the cutoff set by $\beta$. Equilibrium solutions with different $\beta$ thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Johannes Hirn

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) frequently suffer from posterior collapse, where the latent variables become uninformative as the approximate posterior degenerates to the prior. While recent work has characterized collapse as a phase…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zegu Zhang , Jian Zhang

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful method for learning representations of high-dimensional data. However, VAEs can suffer from an issue known as latent variable collapse (or KL loss vanishing), where the posterior collapses to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Ruizhe Li , Xiao Li , Chenghua Lin , Matthew Collinson , Rui Mao

The ability to extract generative parameters from high-dimensional fields of data in an unsupervised manner is a highly desirable yet unrealized goal in computational physics. This work explores the use of variational autoencoders (VAEs)…

Computational Physics · Physics 2021-11-16 Christian Jacobsen , Karthik Duraisamy

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-22 Wei Cheng , Gregory Darnell , Sohini Ramachandran , Lorin Crawford

Predicting future frames for a video sequence is a challenging generative modeling task. Promising approaches include probabilistic latent variable models such as the Variational Auto-Encoder. While VAEs can handle uncertainty and model…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-30 Lluis Castrejon , Nicolas Ballas , Aaron Courville

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Hazhir Aliahmadi , Irina Babayan , Greg van Anders

Latent diffusion has demonstrated promising results in image generation and permits efficient sampling. However, this framework might suffer from the problem of posterior collapse when applied to time series. In this paper, we first show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yangming Li , Yixin Cheng , Mihaela van der Schaar