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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…

In this thesis, we explore the use of deep neural networks for generation of natural language. Specifically, we implement two sequence-to-sequence neural variational models - variational autoencoders (VAE) and variational encoder-decoders…

Current state-of-the-art generative approaches frequently rely on a two-stage training procedure, where an autoencoder (often a VAE) first performs dimensionality reduction, followed by training a generative model on the learned latent…

We present a new method for improving the performances of variational autoencoder (VAE). In addition to enforcing the deep feature consistent principle thus ensuring the VAE output and its corresponding input images to have similar deep…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models that have been widely used in various fields, including image and text generation. However, one of the known challenges in using VAEs is the model's sensitivity to its…

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…

Does a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) consistently encode typical samples generated from its decoder? This paper shows that the perhaps surprising answer to this question is `No'; a (nominally trained) VAE does not necessarily amortize…

The variational autoencoder (VAE) can learn the manifold of natural images on certain datasets, as evidenced by meaningful interpolating or extrapolating in the continuous latent space. However, on discrete data such as text, it is unclear…

A new method for learning variational autoencoders (VAEs) is developed, based on Stein variational gradient descent. A key advantage of this approach is that one need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder…

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…

Self-supervised disentangled representation learning is a critical task in sequence modeling. The learnt representations contribute to better model interpretability as well as the data generation, and improve the sample efficiency for…

The ability to accurately model random fields plays a critical role in science and engineering for problems involving uncertain, spatially-varying quantities such as heterogeneous material properties and turbulent flows. Deep generative…

Variational Autoencoders and their many variants have displayed impressive ability to perform dimensionality reduction, often achieving state-of-the-art performance. Many current methods however, struggle to learn good representations in…

Data augmentation can significantly enhance the performance of machine learning tasks by addressing data scarcity and improving generalization. However, generating time series data presents unique challenges. A model must not only learn a…

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…

Auto-encoding generative adversarial networks (GANs) combine the standard GAN algorithm, which discriminates between real and model-generated data, with a reconstruction loss given by an auto-encoder. Such models aim to prevent mode…

A variational autoencoder (VAE) is a probabilistic machine learning framework for posterior inference that projects an input set of high-dimensional data to a lower-dimensional, latent space. The latent space learned with a VAE offers…

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…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have played a key role in scaling up diffusion-based generative models, as in Stable Diffusion, yet questions regarding their robustness remain largely underexplored. Although adversarial training has been an…

Typical methods for unsupervised text style transfer often rely on two key ingredients: 1) seeking the explicit disentanglement of the content and the attributes, and 2) troublesome adversarial learning. In this paper, we show that neither…