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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…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a standard framework for inducing latent variable models that have been shown effective in learning text representations as well as in text generation. The key challenge with using VAEs is the {\it…
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…
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…
When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is both a powerful language model and an effective representation learning framework. In practice, however, VAEs are trained with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) as a surrogate…
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular combination of deep latent variable model and accompanying variational learning technique. By using a neural inference network to approximate the model's posterior on latent variables, VAEs…
In narrow asymptotic settings Gaussian VAE models of continuous data have been shown to possess global optima aligned with ground-truth distributions. Even so, it is well known that poor solutions whereby the latent posterior collapses to…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact…
This work identifies the existence and cause of a type of posterior collapse that frequently occurs in the Bayesian deep learning practice. For a general linear latent variable model that includes linear variational autoencoders as a…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) hold great potential for modelling text, as they could in theory separate high-level semantic and syntactic properties from local regularities of natural language. Practically, however, VAEs with…
The importance of Variational Autoencoders reaches far beyond standalone generative models -- the approach is also used for learning latent representations and can be generalized to semi-supervised learning. This requires a thorough…
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…
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…
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…
Being one of the most popular generative framework, variational autoencoders(VAE) are known to suffer from a phenomenon termed posterior collapse, i.e. the latent variational distributions collapse to the prior, especially when a strong…
Variational language models seek to estimate the posterior of latent variables with an approximated variational posterior. The model often assumes the variational posterior to be factorized even when the true posterior is not. The learned…
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…
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…
The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful architecture capable of representation learning and generative modeling. When it comes to learning interpretable (disentangled) representations, VAE and its variants show unparalleled…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one of the deep generative models that have experienced enormous success over the past decades. However, in practice, they suffer from a problem called posterior collapse, which occurs when the encoder…