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The Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) learns simultaneously an inference and a generative model, but only one of these models can be learned at optimum, this behaviour is associated to the ELBO learning objective, that is optimised by a…

The InfoNCE objective, originally introduced for contrastive representation learning, has become a popular choice for mutual information (MI) estimation, despite its indirect connection to MI. In this paper, we demonstrate why InfoNCE…

Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational free energy (F) in neuroscience (ELBO = -F). While this…

This paper describes InfoCatVAE, an extension of the variational autoencoder that enables unsupervised disentangled representation learning. InfoCatVAE uses multimodal distributions for the prior and the inference network and then maximizes…

Unnormalised latent variable models are a broad and flexible class of statistical models. However, learning their parameters from data is intractable, and few estimation techniques are currently available for such models. To increase the…

Contrastive learning has emerged as a cornerstone of unsupervised representation learning across vision, language, and graph domains, with InfoNCE as its dominant objective. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical underpinnings of…

In recent years, several unsupervised, "contrastive" learning algorithms in vision have been shown to learn representations that perform remarkably well on transfer tasks. We show that this family of algorithms maximizes a lower bound on…

In variational inference (VI), an approximation of the posterior distribution is selected from a family of distributions through numerical optimization. With the most common variational objective function, known as the evidence lower bound…

Bayesian Inference and Information Bottleneck are the two most popular objectives for neural networks, but they can be optimised only via a variational lower bound: the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB). In this manuscript we show…

Decomposition of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective of VAE used for density estimation revealed the deficiency of VAE for representation learning and suggested ways to improve the model. In this paper, we investigate whether we can…

Information bottleneck (IB) principle [1] has become an important element in information-theoretic analysis of deep models. Many state-of-the-art generative models of both Variational Autoencoder (VAE) [2; 3] and Generative Adversarial…

In self-supervised contrastive learning, a widely-adopted objective function is InfoNCE, which uses the heuristic cosine similarity for the representation comparison, and is closely related to maximizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL)-based…

Masked autoencoders (MAEs) represent a prominent self-supervised learning paradigm in computer vision. Despite their empirical success, the underlying mechanisms of MAEs remain insufficiently understood. Recent studies have attempted to…

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…

User intentions are typically formalized as evaluation rewards to be maximized when fine-tuning language models (LMs). Existing alignment methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are mainly tailored for pairwise preference…

Amortised inference enables scalable learning of sequential latent-variable models (LVMs) with the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this setting, variational posteriors are often only partially conditioned. While the true posteriors depend,…

A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…

We present a new statistical learning paradigm for Boltzmann machines based on a new inference principle we have proposed: the latent maximum entropy principle (LME). LME is different both from Jaynes maximum entropy principle and from…

Disentanglement learning aims to construct independent and interpretable latent variables in which generative models are a popular strategy. InfoGAN is a classic method via maximizing Mutual Information (MI) to obtain interpretable latent…

Variational Autoencoder is a scalable method for learning latent variable models of complex data. It employs a clear objective that can be easily optimized. However, it does not explicitly measure the quality of learned representations. We…