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Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) are capable of learning latent representations for high dimensional data. However, due to the i.i.d. assumption, VAEs only optimize the singleton variational distributions and fail to account for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-20 Da Tang , Dawen Liang , Tony Jebara , Nicholas Ruozzi

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) provide an attractive solution to image generation problem. However, they tend to produce blurred and over-smoothed images due to their dependence on pixel-wise reconstruction loss. This paper introduces a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-04-30 Salman H. Khan , Munawar Hayat , Nick Barnes

We propose to learn a hierarchical prior in the context of variational autoencoders to avoid the over-regularisation resulting from a standard normal prior distribution. To incentivise an informative latent representation of the data, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-08 Alexej Klushyn , Nutan Chen , Richard Kurle , Botond Cseke , Patrick van der Smagt

Biological systems leverage top-down feedback for visual processing, yet most artificial vision models succeed in image classification using purely feedforward or recurrent architectures, calling into question the functional significance of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-12 Antonino Greco , Marco D'Alessandro , Karl J. Friston , Giovanni Pezzulo , Markus Siegel

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

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) has proven to be an effective model for producing semantically meaningful latent representations for natural data. However, it has thus far seen limited application to sequential data, and, as we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Adam Roberts , Jesse Engel , Colin Raffel , Curtis Hawthorne , Douglas Eck

We develop a framework for incorporating structured graphical models in the \emph{encoders} of variational autoencoders (VAEs) that allows us to induce interpretable representations through approximate variational inference. This allows us…

In the last few years there have been important advancements in generative models with the two dominant approaches being Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). However, standard Autoencoders (AEs) and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-07-26 Massimiliano Patacchiola , Patrick Fox-Roberts , Edward Rosten

By composing graphical models with deep learning architectures, we learn generative models with the strengths of both frameworks. The structured variational autoencoder (SVAE) inherits structure and interpretability from graphical models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Harry Bendekgey , Gabriel Hope , Erik B. Sudderth

Primary visual cortex (V1) is the first stage of cortical image processing, and a major effort in systems neuroscience is devoted to understanding how it encodes information about visual stimuli. Within V1, many neurons respond selectively…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-06-21 William F. Kindel , Elijah D. Christensen , Joel Zylberberg

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-08 Yuri Burda , Roger Grosse , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Normalizing flows, autoregressive models, variational autoencoders (VAEs), and deep energy-based models are among competing likelihood-based frameworks for deep generative learning. Among them, VAEs have the advantage of fast and tractable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-11 Arash Vahdat , Jan Kautz

The quality of data representation in deep learning methods is directly related to the prior model imposed on the representations; however, generally used fixed priors are not capable of adjusting to the context in the data. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-18 Rakesh Chalasani , Jose C. Principe

Biological visual systems learn from limited experience, unlike deep learning models that rely on millions of training images. What learning principles make this possible? We tested whether efficient coding, the idea that neural…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ananya Passi , Brian S. Robinson , Michael F. Bonner

The ability of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to learn disentangled representations has made them popular for practical applications. However, their behaviour is not yet fully understood. For example, the questions of when they can provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Lisa Bonheme , Marek Grzes

While unsupervised variational autoencoders (VAE) have become a powerful tool in neuroimage analysis, their application to supervised learning is under-explored. We aim to close this gap by proposing a unified probabilistic model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-15 Qingyu Zhao , Ehsan Adeli , Nicolas Honnorat , Tuo Leng , Kilian M. Pohl

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and its variations are classic generative models by learning a low-dimensional latent representation to satisfy some prior distribution (e.g., Gaussian distribution). Their advantages over GAN are that they can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Cong Geng , Jia Wang , Li Chen , Zhiyong Gao

Humans are able to create rich representations of their external reality. Their internal representations allow for cross-modality inference, where available perceptions can induce the perceptual experience of missing input modalities. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Miguel Vasco , Francisco S. Melo , Ana Paiva

The manifold hypothesis states that high-dimensional data can be modeled as lying on or near a low-dimensional, nonlinear manifold. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) approximate this manifold by learning mappings from low-dimensional latent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-03 Marissa C. Connor , Gregory H. Canal , Christopher J. Rozell

We extend the framework of variational autoencoders to represent transformations explicitly in the latent space. In the family of hierarchical graphical models that emerges, the latent space is populated by higher order objects that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Giorgio Giannone , Saeed Saremi , Jonathan Masci , Christian Osendorfer