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Posterior collapse in variational autoencoders is often diagnosed by its symptoms: a small KL term, a strong decoder, or weak use of the latent code. These signals are useful, but they do not define a collapse boundary. We study a concrete…

The posterior collapse phenomenon in variational autoencoder (VAE), where the variational posterior distribution closely matches the prior distribution, can hinder the quality of the learned latent variables. As a consequence of posterior…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a standard framework for inducing latent variable models that have been shown effective in learning text representations as well as in text generation. The key challenge with using VAEs is the {\it…

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful method for learning representations of high-dimensional data. However, VAEs can suffer from an issue known as latent variable collapse (or KL loss vanishing), where the posterior collapses to the…

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) framework is a popular option for training unsupervised generative models, featuring ease of training and latent representation of data. The objective function of VAE does not guarantee to achieve the…

The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular combination of deep latent variable model and accompanying variational learning technique. By using a neural inference network to approximate the model's posterior on latent variables, VAEs…

We investigate the phenomenon of posterior collapse in variational autoencoders (VAEs) from the perspective of statistical physics, and reveal that it constitutes a phase transition governed jointly by data structure and model…

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are well-established as a principled approach to probabilistic unsupervised learning with neural networks. Typically, an encoder network defines the parameters of a Gaussian distributed latent space from…

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…

We take steps towards understanding the "posterior collapse (PC)" difficulty in variational autoencoders (VAEs),~i.e. a degenerate optimum in which the latent codes become independent of their corresponding inputs. We rely on calculus of…

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…

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,…

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…

Learning latent representations that are simultaneously expressive, geometrically well-structured, and reliably calibrated remains a central challenge for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). Standard VAEs typically assume a diagonal Gaussian…

When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is both a powerful language model and an effective representation learning framework. In practice, however, VAEs are trained with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) as a surrogate…

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They enable scalable approximate posterior inference in latent-variable models using variational inference (VI). A VAE posits a variational family…

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is known to suffer from the phenomenon of \textit{posterior collapse}, where the latent representations generated by the model become independent of the inputs. This leads to degenerated representations of…

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one class of generative probabilistic latent-variable models designed for inference based on known data. We develop three variations on VAEs by introducing a second parameterized encoder/decoder pair and,…

In principle, applying variational autoencoders (VAEs) to sequential data offers a method for controlled sequence generation, manipulation, and structured representation learning. However, training sequence VAEs is challenging:…