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Variational autoencoders employ an amortized inference model to approximate the posterior of latent variables. However, such amortized variational inference faces two challenges: (1) the limited posterior expressiveness of fully-factorized…
Semi-supervised variational autoencoders (VAEs) have obtained strong results, but have also encountered the challenge that good ELBO values do not always imply accurate inference results. In this paper, we investigate and propose two causes…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used deep generative models capable of learning unsupervised latent representations of data. Such representations are often difficult to interpret or control. We consider the problem of…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are expressive latent variable models that can be used to learn complex probability distributions from training data. However, the quality of the resulting model crucially relies on the expressiveness of the…
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…
Although variational autoencoders (VAE) are successfully used to obtain meaningful low-dimensional representations for high-dimensional data, the characterization of critical points of the loss function for general observation models is not…
Amortised inference enables scalable learning of sequential latent-variable models (LVMs) with the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this setting, variational posteriors are often only partially conditioned. While the true posteriors depend,…
Density estimation, compression and data generation are crucial tasks in artificial intelligence. Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) constitute a single framework to achieve these goals. Here, we present a novel class of generative models,…
We consider the problem of learning Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), i.e., a type of deep generative model, from data with missing values. Such data is omnipresent in real-world applications of machine learning because complete data is…
Due to the phenomenon of "posterior collapse," current latent variable generative models pose a challenging design choice that either weakens the capacity of the decoder or requires augmenting the objective so it does not only maximize the…
Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They enable scalable approximate posterior inference in latent-variable models using variational inference (VI). A VAE posits a variational family…
Variational autoencoders (VAE) represent a popular, flexible form of deep generative model that can be stochastically fit to samples from a given random process using an information-theoretic variational bound on the true underlying…
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…
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…
The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful framework for learning probabilistic latent variable generative models. However, typical assumptions on the approximate posterior distribution of the encoder and/or the prior, seriously…
The variational autoencoder (VAE; Kingma, Welling (2014)) is a recently proposed generative model pairing a top-down generative network with a bottom-up recognition network which approximates posterior inference. It typically makes strong…
An implicit goal in works on deep generative models is that such models should be able to generate novel examples that were not previously seen in the training data. In this paper, we investigate to what extent this property holds for…
We propose a new family of optimization criteria for variational auto-encoding models, generalizing the standard evidence lower bound. We provide conditions under which they recover the data distribution and learn latent features, and…
Training deep generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) requires propagating gradients through stochastic latent variables, which introduces estimation variance that can slow convergence and degrade performance. In this paper,…
The Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) learns simultaneously an inference and a generative model, but only one of these models can be learned at optimum, this behaviour is associated to the ELBO learning objective, that is optimised by a…