Related papers: Preventing Posterior Collapse with delta-VAEs

Density estimation, compression and data generation are crucial tasks in artificial intelligence. Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) constitute a single framework to achieve these goals. Here, we present a novel class of generative models,…

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a well-studied, deep, latent-variable model (DLVM) that efficiently optimizes the variational lower bound of the log marginal data likelihood and has a strong theoretical foundation. However, the VAE's…

Deep latent variable models (DLVMs) are designed to learn meaningful representations in an unsupervised manner, such that the hidden explanatory factors are interpretable by independent latent variables (aka disentanglement). The…

Latent variable models like the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) are commonly used to learn representations of images. However, for downstream tasks like semantic classification, the representations learned by VAE are less competitive than…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are essential tools in end-to-end representation learning. However, the sequential text generation common pitfall with VAEs is that the model tends to ignore latent variables with a strong auto-regressive…

We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…

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…

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful framework for learning probabilistic latent variable generative models. However, typical assumptions on the approximate posterior distribution of the encoder and/or the prior, seriously…

Variational Autoencoder (VAE), a simple and effective deep generative model, has led to a number of impressive empirical successes and spawned many advanced variants and theoretical investigations. However, recent studies demonstrate that,…

Text variational autoencoders (VAEs) are notorious for posterior collapse, a phenomenon where the model's decoder learns to ignore signals from the encoder. Because posterior collapse is known to be exacerbated by expressive decoders,…

Learning useful representations without supervision remains a key challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful generative model that learns such discrete representations. Our model, the Vector…

Variational autoencoders have been widely applied for natural language generation, however, there are two long-standing problems: information under-representation and posterior collapse. The former arises from the fact that only the last…

In principle, applying variational autoencoders (VAEs) to sequential data offers a method for controlled sequence generation, manipulation, and structured representation learning. However, training sequence VAEs is challenging:…

In variational autoencoders (VAEs), the variational posterior often collapses to the prior, known as posterior collapse, which leads to poor representation learning quality. An adjustable hyperparameter beta has been introduced in VAEs to…

Paradoxically, a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) could be pushed in two opposite directions, utilizing powerful decoder model for generating realistic images but collapsing the learned representation, or increasing regularization coefficient…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used deep generative models capable of learning unsupervised latent representations of data. Such representations are often difficult to interpret or control. We consider the problem of…

Recent work on generative modeling of text has found that variational auto-encoders (VAE) incorporating LSTM decoders perform worse than simpler LSTM language models (Bowman et al., 2015). This negative result is so far poorly understood,…

A variational autoencoder (VAE) is a probabilistic machine learning framework for posterior inference that projects an input set of high-dimensional data to a lower-dimensional, latent space. The latent space learned with a VAE offers…

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…

While disentangled representations have shown promise in generative modeling and representation learning, their downstream usefulness remains debated. Recent studies re-defined disentanglement through a formal connection to symmetries,…