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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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-13 Robert I. Cukier

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Yuri Kinoshita , Kenta Oono , Kenji Fukumizu , Yuichi Yoshida , Shin-ichi Maeda

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

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Linh Tran , Maja Pantic , Marc Peter Deisenroth

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Fotios Lygerakis , Elmar Rueckert

We prove that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) employed by variational auto-encoders (VAEs) admits non-trivial solutions having constant posterior variances under certain mild conditions, removing the need to learn variances in the encoder.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Graham Fyffe

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) suffer from posterior collapse, where the powerful neural networks used for modeling and inference optimize the objective without meaningfully using the latent representation. We introduce inference critics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Sachit Menon , David Blei , Carl Vondrick

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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Zhen Li , Fan Zhang , Zheng Zhang , Yu Chen

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Anthony L. Caterini , Arnaud Doucet , Dino Sejdinovic

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Mark Collier , Alfredo Nazabal , Christopher K. I. Williams

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-14 Hien Dang , Tho Tran , Tan Nguyen , Nhat Ho

The surrogate loss of variational autoencoders (VAEs) poses various challenges to their training, inducing the imbalance between task fitting and representation inference. To avert this, the existing strategies for VAEs focus on adjusting…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Zhangkai Wu , Longbing Cao , Lei Qi