Related papers: Zero-Variance Gradients for Variational Autoencode…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…
Variational autoencdoers (VAE) are a popular approach to generative modelling. However, exploiting the capabilities of VAEs in practice can be difficult. Recent work on regularised and entropic autoencoders have begun to explore the…
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…
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)…
Deep generative models are increasingly becoming integral parts of the in silico molecule design pipeline and have dual goals of learning the chemical and structural features that render candidate molecules viable while also being flexible…
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…
Learning in models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high variance gradient estimators. Generally, approaches have relied on control variates to reduce the variance of the REINFORCE estimator. Recent work (Jang et al.…
As a widely recognized approach to deep generative modeling, Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) still face challenges with the quality of generated images, often presenting noticeable blurriness. This issue stems from the unrealistic…
We analyse the properties of an unbiased gradient estimator of the ELBO for variational inference, based on the score function method with leave-one-out control variates. We show that this gradient estimator can be obtained using a new…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn representations of data by jointly training a probabilistic encoder and decoder network. Typically these models encode all features of the data into a single variable. Here we are interested in learning…
Multimodal variational autoencoders have demonstrated their ability to learn the relationships between different modalities by mapping them into a latent representation. Their design and capacity to perform any-to-any conditional and…
Generative thermal design for complex geometries is fundamental in many areas of engineering, yet it faces two main challenges: the high computational cost of high-fidelity simulations and the limitations of conventional generative models.…
A key advance in learning generative models is the use of amortized inference distributions that are jointly trained with the models. We find that existing training objectives for variational autoencoders can lead to inaccurate amortized…
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are expressive latent variable models that can be used to learn complex probability distributions from training data. However, the quality of the resulting model crucially relies on the expressiveness of the…
When designing variational autoencoders (VAEs) or other types of latent space models, the dimensionality of the latent space is typically defined upfront. In this process, it is possible that the number of dimensions is under- or…
Euclidean geometry has historically been the typical "workhorse" for machine learning applications due to its power and simplicity. However, it has recently been shown that geometric spaces with constant non-zero curvature improve…
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,…
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 ability to extract generative parameters from high-dimensional fields of data in an unsupervised manner is a highly desirable yet unrealized goal in computational physics. This work explores the use of variational autoencoders (VAEs)…
The representation of the approximate posterior is a critical aspect of effective variational autoencoders (VAEs). Poor choices for the approximate posterior have a detrimental impact on the generative performance of VAEs due to the…