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Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) are deep generative latent variable models consisting of two components: a generative model that captures a data distribution p(x) by transforming a distribution p(z) over latent space, and an inference…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a recent approximate method for Bayesian inference. It has the merit of being a fast and scalable alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) but its approximation error is often unknown. In this paper, we…
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular probabilistic generative model. However, one shortcoming of VAEs is that the latent variables cannot be discrete, which makes it difficult to generate data from different modes of a…
In settings requiring synthetic data generation based on a clinical cohort, e.g., due to data protection regulations, heterogeneity across individuals might be a nuisance that we need to control or faithfully preserve. The sources of such…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) provide an effective and simple method for modeling complex distributions. However, training VAEs often requires considerable hyperparameter tuning to determine the optimal amount of information retained by…
The Linear Ballistic Accumulator (Brown & Heathcote, 2008) model is used as a measurement tool to answer questions about applied psychology. The analyses based on this model depend upon the model selected and its estimated parameters.…
Posterior collapse in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) arises when the variational posterior distribution closely matches the prior for a subset of latent variables. This paper presents a simple and intuitive explanation for posterior…
The central objective function of a variational autoencoder (VAE) is its variational lower bound (the ELBO). Here we show that for standard (i.e., Gaussian) VAEs the ELBO converges to a value given by the sum of three entropies: the…
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…
We investigate large-scale latent variable models (LVMs) for neural story generation -- an under-explored application for open-domain long text -- with objectives in two threads: generation effectiveness and controllability. LVMs,…
The framework of variational autoencoders allows us to efficiently learn deep latent-variable models, such that the model's marginal distribution over observed variables fits the data. Often, we're interested in going a step further, and…
Advances in latent diffusion models (LDMs) have revolutionized high-resolution image generation, but the design space of the autoencoder that is central to these systems remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LiteVAE, a new…
In this paper, we study two aspects of the variational autoencoder (VAE): the prior distribution over the latent variables and its corresponding posterior. First, we decompose the learning of VAEs into layerwise density estimation, and…
Detectors in next-generation high-energy physics experiments face several daunting requirements, such as high data rates, damaging radiation exposure, and stringent constraints on power, space, and latency. To address these challenges,…
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…
We introduce a new algorithm for approximate inference that combines reparametrization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and variational methods. We construct a very flexible implicit variational distribution synthesized by an arbitrary Markov…
This paper introduces a new interpretation of the Variational Autoencoder framework by taking a fully geometric point of view. We argue that vanilla VAE models unveil naturally a Riemannian structure in their latent space and that taking…
Posterior collapse plagues VAEs for text, especially for conditional text generation with strong autoregressive decoders. In this work, we address this problem in variational neural machine translation by explicitly promoting mutual…
We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…
Sampling trajectories from a distribution followed by ranking them based on a specified cost function is a common approach in autonomous driving. Typically, the sampling distribution is hand-crafted (e.g a Gaussian, or a grid). Recently,…