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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…

The central objective function of a variational autoencoder (VAE) is its variational lower bound (the ELBO). Here we show that for standard (i.e., Gaussian) VAEs the ELBO converges to a value given by the sum of three entropies: the…

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 class of generative probabilistic latent-variable models designed for inference based on known data. We develop three variations on VAEs by introducing a second parameterized encoder/decoder pair and,…

Traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are constrained by the limitations of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) formulation, particularly when utilizing simplistic, non-analytic, or unknown prior distributions. These limitations inhibit…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one class of generative probabilistic latent-variable models designed for inference based on known data. They balance reconstruction and regularizer terms. A variational approximation produces an evidence…

Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have become very popular techniques to perform inference and learning in latent variable models as they allow us to leverage the rich representational power of neural networks to obtain flexible…

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…

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…

Multimodal learning with variational autoencoders (VAEs) requires estimating joint distributions to evaluate the evidence lower bound (ELBO). Current methods, the product and mixture of experts, aggregate single-modality distributions…

Variational auto-encoders (VAE) are popular deep latent variable models which are trained by maximizing an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). To obtain tighter ELBO and hence better variational approximations, it has been proposed to use…

Many crucial problems in deep learning and statistical inference are caused by a variational gap, i.e., a difference between model evidence (log-likelihood) and evidence lower bound (ELBO). In particular, in a classical VAE setting that…

Real world datasets often contain entries with missing elements e.g. in a medical dataset, a patient is unlikely to have taken all possible diagnostic tests. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are popular generative models often used for…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs), as an important aspect of generative models, have received a lot of research interests and reached many successful applications. However, it is always a challenge to achieve the consistency between the…

Recent work in unsupervised learning has focused on efficient inference and learning in latent variables models. Training these models by maximizing the evidence (marginal likelihood) is typically intractable. Thus, a common approximation…

We consider a variational autoencoder (VAE) for binary data. Our main innovations are an interpretable lower bound for its training objective, a modified initialization and architecture of such a VAE that leads to faster training, and a…

Recent work in unsupervised representation learning has focused on learning deep directed latent-variable models. Fitting these models by maximizing the marginal likelihood or evidence is typically intractable, thus a common approximation…

Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) have been very successful as methods for forming compressed latent representations of complex, often high-dimensional, data. In this paper, we derive an alternative variational lower bound from the one…

A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results…