Related papers: Resetting a fixed broken ELBO

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…

We propose a framework for the statistical evaluation of variational auto-encoders (VAEs) and test two instances of this framework in the context of modelling images of handwritten digits and a corpus of English text. Our take on evaluation…

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…

Text variational autoencoders (VAEs) are notorious for posterior collapse, a phenomenon where the model's decoder learns to ignore signals from the encoder. Because posterior collapse is known to be exacerbated by expressive decoders,…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have recently been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein they are fooled into reconstructing a chosen target image. However, how to defend against such attacks remains an open problem. We…

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…

Training deep generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) requires propagating gradients through stochastic latent variables, which introduces estimation variance that can slow convergence and degrade performance. In this paper,…

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is an inexpensive and widely available tool for cardiac assessment. Despite its standardized format and small file size, the high complexity and inter-individual variability of ECG signals (typically a…

Deep speaker embedding has achieved state-of-the-art performance in speaker recognition. A potential problem of these embedded vectors (called `x-vectors') are not Gaussian, causing performance degradation with the famous PLDA back-end…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) often struggle to represent non-commutative structure in learned latent spaces. Symmetry-aware VAEs commonly address this issue by enforcing commutativity through algebraic regularization, which is…

Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2seq) models have played an important role in the recent success of various natural language processing methods, such as machine translation, text summarization, and speech recognition. However, current Seq2seq…

This study investigates the use of non-linear unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques to compress a music dataset into a low-dimensional representation which can be used in turn for the synthesis of new sounds. We systematically…

Variational autoencoders (VAE) have quickly become a central tool in machine learning, applicable to a broad range of data types and latent variable models. By far the most common first step, taken by seminal papers and by core software…

Recent state-of-the-art autoencoder based generative models have an encoder-decoder structure and learn a latent representation with a pre-defined distribution that can be sampled from. Implementing the encoder networks of these models in a…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have received much attention recently as an end-to-end architecture for text generation with latent variables. In this paper, we investigate several multi-level structures to learn a VAE model to generate…

We propose a novel VAE-based deep auto-encoder model that can learn disentangled latent representations in a fully unsupervised manner, endowed with the ability to identify all meaningful sources of variation and their cardinality. Our…

The performance of $\beta$-Variational-Autoencoders ($\beta$-VAEs) and their variants on learning semantically meaningful, disentangled representations is unparalleled. On the other hand, there are theoretical arguments suggesting the…

Despite its wide use and empirical successes, the theoretical understanding and study of the behaviour and performance of the variational autoencoder (VAE) have only emerged in the past few years. We contribute to this recent line of work…

Predicting future frames for a video sequence is a challenging generative modeling task. Promising approaches include probabilistic latent variable models such as the Variational Auto-Encoder. While VAEs can handle uncertainty and model…

Bayesian optimisation in the latent space of a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) is a powerful framework for optimisation tasks over complex structured domains, such as the space of scientifically interesting molecules. However, existing…