Related papers: VAE Approximation Error: ELBO and Exponential Fami…
Variational Autoencoders (VAE) are popular generative models used to sample from complex data distributions. Despite their empirical success in various machine learning tasks, significant gaps remain in understanding their theoretical…
Despite advances in deep probabilistic models, learning discrete latent representations remains challenging. This work introduces a novel method to improve inference in discrete Variational Autoencoders by reframing the inference problem…
We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…
Despite the success in learning semantically meaningful, unsupervised disentangled representations, variational autoencoders (VAEs) and their variants face a fundamental theoretical challenge: substantial evidence indicates that…
Modern generative models are usually designed to match target distributions directly in the data space, where the intrinsic dimension of data can be much lower than the ambient dimension. We argue that this discrepancy may contribute to the…
The framework of variational autoencoders (VAEs) provides a principled method for jointly learning latent-variable models and corresponding inference models. However, the main drawback of this approach is the blurriness of the generated…
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…
Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have shown great potential in the unsupervised learning of data distributions. An VAE trained on normal images is expected to only be able to reconstruct normal images, allowing the localization of anomalous…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) enjoy an intuitive connection to manifold learning: in training the decoder/generator is optimized to approximate a homeomorphism between the data distribution and…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been used extensively to discover low-dimensional latent factors governing neural activity and animal behavior. However, without careful model selection, the uncovered latent factors may reflect noise in…
Unsupervised representation learning via generative modeling is a staple to many computer vision applications in the absence of labeled data. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models that learn representations useful…
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…
Estimating causal effects from observational data (at either an individual -- or a population -- level) is critical for making many types of decisions. One approach to address this task is to learn decomposed representations of the…
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…
Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) are deep generative latent variable models that are widely used for a number of downstream tasks. While it has been demonstrated that VAE training can suffer from a number of pathologies, existing literature…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) hold great potential for modelling text, as they could in theory separate high-level semantic and syntactic properties from local regularities of natural language. Practically, however, VAEs with…
Amortized inference allows latent-variable models trained via variational learning to scale to large datasets. The quality of approximate inference is determined by two factors: a) the capacity of the variational distribution to match the…
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…
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,…
Multi-agent behavior modeling and trajectory forecasting are crucial for the safe navigation of autonomous agents in interactive scenarios. Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has been widely applied in multi-agent interaction modeling to…