Related papers: The Usual Suspects? Reassessing Blame for VAE Post…
VAEs (Variational AutoEncoders) have proved to be powerful in the context of density modeling and have been used in a variety of contexts for creative purposes. In many settings, the data we model possesses continuous attributes that we…
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…
Despite their successes, deep neural networks may make unreliable predictions when faced with test data drawn from a distribution different to that of the training data, constituting a major problem for AI safety. While this has recently…
Unsupervised meta-learning aims to learn the meta knowledge from unlabeled data and rapidly adapt to novel tasks. However, existing approaches may be misled by the context-bias (e.g. background) from the training data. In this paper, we…
Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference with a…
Machine learning methods often need a large amount of labeled training data. Since the training data is assumed to be the ground truth, outliers can severely degrade learned representations and performance of trained models. Here we apply…
We develop a generalisation of disentanglement in VAEs---decomposition of the latent representation---characterising it as the fulfilment of two factors: a) the latent encodings of the data having an appropriate level of overlap, and b) the…
We present a coupled Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) method that improves the accuracy and robustness of the probabilistic inferences on represented data. The new method models the dependency between input feature vectors (images) and weighs…
Neural collapse (NC) and its multi-layer variant, deep neural collapse (DNC), describe a structured geometry that occurs in the features and weights of trained deep networks. Recent theoretical work by Sukenik et al. using a deep…
Inference for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) consists of learning two models: (1) a generative model, which transforms a simple distribution over a latent space into the distribution over observed data, and (2) an inference model, which…
Gaussian distributions are widely used in Bayesian variational inference to approximate intractable posterior densities, but the ability to accommodate skewness can improve approximation accuracy significantly, when data or prior…
We introduce an improved variational autoencoder (VAE) for text modeling with topic information explicitly modeled as a Dirichlet latent variable. By providing the proposed model topic awareness, it is more superior at reconstructing input…
We study exact constant collapse in variational autoencoders: the deterministic encoder mean becomes independent of the input. The prior remains the standard Gaussian. Before VAE training, we select a fixed teacher posterior from a…
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,…
There has been a lot of recent interest in trying to characterize the error surface of deep models. This stems from a long standing question. Given that deep networks are highly nonlinear systems optimized by local gradient methods, why do…
Variational autoencoders (VAE) encode data into lower-dimensional latent vectors before decoding those vectors back to data. Once trained, one can hope to detect out-of-distribution (abnormal) latent vectors, but several issues arise when…
The widespread use of generative models has created a feedback loop, in which each generation of models is trained on data partially produced by its predecessors. This process has raised concerns about model collapse: A critical degradation…
Although the variational autoencoder (VAE) and its conditional extension (CVAE) are capable of state-of-the-art results across multiple domains, their precise behavior is still not fully understood, particularly in the context of data (like…
Consider the Gaussian sequence model under the additional assumption that a fixed fraction of the means is known. We study the problem of variance estimation from a frequentist Bayesian perspective. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE)…
In the Bayesian approach to inverse problems, data are often informative, relative to the prior, only on a low-dimensional subspace of the parameter space. Significant computational savings can be achieved by using this subspace to…