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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

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-04 Bohan Li , Junxian He , Graham Neubig , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Yiming Yang

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

The variational autoencoder (VAE) can learn the manifold of natural images on certain datasets, as evidenced by meaningful interpolating or extrapolating in the continuous latent space. However, on discrete data such as text, it is unclear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-10 Peng Xu , Jackie Chi Kit Cheung , Yanshuai Cao

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is known to suffer from the phenomenon of \textit{posterior collapse}, where the latent representations generated by the model become independent of the inputs. This leads to degenerated representations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Fotios Lygerakis , Elmar Rueckert

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

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) often suffer from posterior collapse, which is a phenomenon in which the learned latent space becomes uninformative. This is often related to the hyperparameter resembling the data variance. It can be shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Yuhta Takida , Wei-Hsiang Liao , Chieh-Hsin Lai , Toshimitsu Uesaka , Shusuke Takahashi , Yuki Mitsufuji

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Zihao Wang , Liu Ziyin

Hierarchical Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are among the most popular likelihood-based generative models. There is a consensus that the top-down hierarchical VAEs allow effective learning of deep latent structures and avoid problems like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Anna Kuzina , Jakub M. Tomczak

The ability of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to learn disentangled representations has made them popular for practical applications. However, their behaviour is not yet fully understood. For example, the questions of when they can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Lisa Bonheme , Marek Grzes

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuma Ichikawa , Koji Hukushima

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used as a generative model to approximate a model's posterior on latent variables by combining the amortized variational inference and deep neural networks. However, when paired with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Qile Zhu , Jianlin Su , Wei Bi , Xiaojiang Liu , Xiyao Ma , Xiaolin Li , Dapeng Wu

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a flexible and scalable framework for non-linear dimensionality reduction. However, in application domains such as genomics where data sets are typically tabular and high-dimensional, a black-box…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-10 Kaspar Märtens , Christopher Yau

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:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Đorđe Miladinović , Kumar Shridhar , Kushal Jain , Max B. Paulus , Joachim M. Buhmann , Mrinmaya Sachan , Carl Allen

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular class of deep generative models with many variants and a wide range of applications. Improvements upon the standard VAE mostly focus on the modelling of the posterior distribution over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 James Langley , Miguel Monteiro , Charles Jones , Nick Pawlowski , Ben Glocker

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

As a general-purpose generative model architecture, VAE has been widely used in the field of image and natural language processing. VAE maps high dimensional sample data into continuous latent variables with unsupervised learning. Sampling…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-05 Yao Li