Related papers: Bounding Evidence and Estimating Log-Likelihood in…

Several variational bounds involving importance weighting ideas generalize the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) for marginal likelihood optimization, such as the Importance-weighted Auto-Encoder (IWAE), Variational R\'enyi (VR) and VR-IWAE…

When training large models on limited data, avoiding overfitting is paramount. Common grid search or smarter search methods rely on expensive separate runs for each candidate hyperparameter, while carving out a validation set that reduces…

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…

Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…

Auto-encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB) is a powerful and general algorithm for fitting latent variable models (a promising direction for unsupervised learning), and is well-known for training the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). In this…

Binary Neural Networks (BiNNs), which employ single-bit precision weights, have emerged as a promising solution to reduce memory usage and power consumption while maintaining competitive performance in large-scale systems. However, training…

This article studies the Fisher-Rao gradient, also referred to as the natural gradient, of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) which plays a central role in generative machine learning. It reveals that the gap between the evidence and its lower…

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 one of the powerful unsupervised learning frameworks in NLP for latent representation learning and latent-directed generation. The classic optimization goal of VAEs is to maximize the Evidence Lower Bound…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have become a cornerstone in generative modeling and representation learning within machine learning. This paper explores a nuanced aspect of VAEs, focusing on interpreting the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) have been very successful as methods for forming compressed latent representations of complex, often high-dimensional, data. In this paper, we derive an alternative variational lower bound from the one…

In Bayesian machine learning, the posterior distribution is typically computationally intractable, hence variational inference is often required. In this approach, an evidence lower bound on the log likelihood of data is maximized during…

In variational inference (VI), the marginal log-likelihood is estimated using the standard evidence lower bound (ELBO), or improved versions as the importance weighted ELBO (IWELBO). We propose the multiple importance sampling ELBO…

The importance of Variational Autoencoders reaches far beyond standalone generative models -- the approach is also used for learning latent representations and can be generalized to semi-supervised learning. This requires a thorough…

Variational inference (VI) is a widely used framework in Bayesian estimation. For most of the non-Gaussian statistical models, it is infeasible to find an analytically tractable solution to estimate the posterior distributions of the…

VAE, or variational auto-encoder, compresses data into latent attributes, and generates new data of different varieties. VAE based on KL divergence has been considered as an effective technique for data augmentation. In this paper, we…

Advances in variational inference enable parameterisation of probabilistic models by deep neural networks. This combines the statistical transparency of the probabilistic modelling framework with the representational power of deep learning.…

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…

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…

When used as a surrogate objective for maximum likelihood estimation in latent variable models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) produces state-of-the-art results. Inspired by this, we consider the extension of the ELBO to a family of lower…