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In the loss function of Variational Autoencoders there is a well known tension between two components: the reconstruction loss, improving the quality of the resulting images, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, acting as a regularizer of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Andrea Asperti , Matteo Trentin

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative modelling methods, however they suffer from blurry generated samples and reconstructions compared to the images they have been trained on. Significant research effort has been spent to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Gustav Bredell , Kyriakos Flouris , Krishna Chaitanya , Ertunc Erdil , Ender Konukoglu

In Bayesian machine learning, the posterior distribution is typically computationally intractable, hence variational inference is often required. In this approach, an evidence lower bound on the log likelihood of data is maximized during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Stephen Odaibo

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a notorious problem wherein the variational posterior often aligns closely with the prior, a phenomenon known as posterior collapse, which hinders the quality of representation learning. To mitigate this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-25 Yuma Ichikawa , Koji Hukushima

Unsupervised and semi-supervised ML methods such as variational autoencoders (VAE) have become widely adopted across multiple areas of physics, chemistry, and materials sciences due to their capability in disentangling representations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-04 Arpan Biswas , Rama Vasudevan , Maxim Ziatdinov , Sergei V. Kalinin

Deep latent variable models (LVM) such as variational auto-encoder (VAE) have recently played an important role in text generation. One key factor is the exploitation of smooth latent structures to guide the generation. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Le Fang , Chunyuan Li , Jianfeng Gao , Wen Dong , Changyou Chen

Posterior collapse in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) arises when the variational posterior distribution closely matches the prior for a subset of latent variables. This paper presents a simple and intuitive explanation for posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 James Lucas , George Tucker , Roger Grosse , Mohammad Norouzi

Posterior collapse plagues VAEs for text, especially for conditional text generation with strong autoregressive decoders. In this work, we address this problem in variational neural machine translation by explicitly promoting mutual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Arya D. McCarthy , Xian Li , Jiatao Gu , Ning Dong

Due to the intractable partition function, training energy-based models (EBMs) by maximum likelihood requires Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to approximate the gradient of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between data and model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-28 Jianwen Xie , Zilong Zheng , Ping Li

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Xuezhe Ma , Chunting Zhou , Eduard Hovy

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a popular and powerful model applied to text modelling to generate diverse sentences. However, an issue known as posterior collapse (or KL loss vanishing) happens when the VAE is used in text modelling,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Ruizhe Li , Xiao Li , Guanyi Chen , Chenghua Lin

VAE, or variational auto-encoder, compresses data into latent attributes, and generates new data of different varieties. VAE based on KL divergence has been considered as an effective technique for data augmentation. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Zichuan Chen , Peng Liu

Due to the phenomenon of "posterior collapse," current latent variable generative models pose a challenging design choice that either weakens the capacity of the decoder or requires augmenting the objective so it does not only maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-14 Ali Razavi , Aäron van den Oord , Ben Poole , Oriol Vinyals

As one of the most popular generative models, Variational Autoencoder (VAE) approximates the posterior of latent variables based on amortized variational inference. However, when the decoder network is sufficiently expressive, VAE may lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Dazhong Shen , Chuan Qin , Chao Wang , Hengshu Zhu , Enhong Chen , Hui Xiong

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) are trained to optimize an entire distribution over their weights instead of a single set, having significant advantages in terms of, e.g., interpretability, multi-task learning, and calibration. Because of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jary Pomponi , Simone Scardapane , Aurelio Uncini

Variational autoencoders learn distributions of high-dimensional data. They model data with a deep latent-variable model and then fit the model by maximizing a lower bound of the log marginal likelihood. VAEs can capture complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-01 Adji B. Dieng , Yoon Kim , Alexander M. Rush , David M. Blei

Learning latent representations that are simultaneously expressive, geometrically well-structured, and reliably calibrated remains a central challenge for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). Standard VAEs typically assume a diagonal Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mehmet Can Yavuz

Variational autoencoders (VAEs), one of the most widely used generative models, are known to suffer from posterior collapse, a phenomenon that reduces the diversity of generated samples. To avoid posterior collapse, many prior works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Hyunsoo Song , Seungwhan Kim , Seungkyu Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Surojit Saha , Sarang Joshi , Ross Whitaker

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental concept in information theory that quantifies the discrepancy between two probability distributions. In the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it serves as a central regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Andrés Muñoz , Rodrigo Ramele