This work tackles posterior collapse in conditional and hierarchical VAEs.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs leads to poor latent variable representations.
method Theoretical analysis of linear conditional and hierarchical VAEs, empirical validation.
result Theoretical and empirical evidence of posterior collapse causes in conditional and hierarchical VAEs.
Proposes a method to learn conditional VAEs from datasets with missing covariates.
problem Learning conditional VAEs from datasets with missing covariates.
method Augments conditional VAEs with a prior distribution for missing covariates and estimates their posterior using amortised variational inference.
result The proposed method outperforms previous methods in learning conditional VAEs from non-temporal, temporal, and longitudinal datasets.
In this paper, we integrate VAEs and flow-based generative models successfully and get f-VAEs. Compared with VAEs, f-VAEs generate more vivid images, solved the blurred-image problem of VAEs. Compared with flow-based models such as Glow, f-VAE is more lightweight and converges faster, achieving the same performance und…
Posterior Matching enables VAEs to model arbitrary conditional densities.
problem Modeling conditional dependencies in unsupervised learning.
method Posterior Matching framework for arbitrary conditioning.
result Posterior Matching enables VAEs to perform arbitrary conditioning without modification.
This paper improves conditional sampling for VAEs by overcoming structural issues.
problem Computational intractability of conditional sampling in VAEs.
method Proposes two methods to address pitfalls in Metropolis-within-Gibbs (MWG) for VAEs.
result Improved performance on sampling tasks.
A new method for VAEs improves latent space disentanglement without violating probability laws.
problem Improving latent space disentanglement in VAEs without violating probability laws.
method Developed a Renyi VAE with a conditional distribution not learned, using Singular Value Decomposition for evaluation.
result Improved latent space disentanglement without violating probability laws.
NeRF-VAE generates 3D scenes with geometric structure from few images.
problem Generating 3D scenes from few images with geometric consistency.
method Combines NeRF and VAE, incorporating shared geometric structure.
result NeRF-VAE can infer and render geometrically-consistent scenes from unseen environments.
C-t3VAE improves class representation in long-tailed generative models.
problem Latent geometric bias in VAEs under class imbalance.
method Per-class Student's t-distribution priors, closed-form objective, equal-weight latent mixture.
result Consistently lower FID scores and better class-balanced generation for severely imbalanced datasets.
In many data analysis tasks, it is beneficial to learn representations where each dimension is statistically independent and thus disentangled from the others. If data generating factors are also statistically independent, disentangled representations can be formed by Bayesian inference of latent variables. We examine …
VAE leverages MMSE channel estimation with data-driven modeling.
problem Data-driven channel estimation for wireless communications.
method Variational autoencoder (VAE) modeling of channel distribution and LMMSE approximation.
result VAE-based channel estimators approximate MMSE performance with practical training methods.
Half-AVAE enhances VAE for underdetermined ICA with adversarial training.
problem Challenges in ICA under underdetermined conditions.
method Encoder-free VAE with adversarial networks and EE terms.
result Half-AVAE outperforms baseline models in underdetermined ICA.
GUIDE-VAE generates user-guided data with improved realism and performance.
problem Generating data points for multi-user datasets while considering user information.
method Conditional generative model that integrates user embeddings and a pattern dictionary-based covariance composition.
result GUIDE-VAE outperforms conventional VAEs in multi-user settings, especially under data imbalance.
VAE global minima can learn correct manifold dimensions, even with conditioning variables.
problem Understanding VAE behavior on manifolds and adapting to varying dimensions.
method Proving VAE global minima can learn correct manifold dimensions and extending to CVAEs.
result Proven that VAE global minima can learn correct manifold dimensions and adapted to CVAEs.
GMVAEs cluster and generate game levels without labels.
problem Manual exploration of latent space for VAE-generated game levels.
method Apply Gaussian Mixture VAEs (GMVAEs) to learn latent clusters and generate levels.
result GMVAEs can cluster and generate game levels without requiring labels.
High-dimensional VAEs inevitably collapse to prior, requiring large datasets for good performance.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs leads to poor representation learning quality.
method Analyzed a minimal VAE in a high-dimensional limit, evaluating conditions for posterior collapse with respect to beta and dataset size.
result VAEs face 'inevitable posterior collapse' beyond a certain beta threshold, regardless of dataset size.
Proposes a multi-view VAE for imputing missing data from correlated sources.
problem Imputing missing data from multi-view sources with latent space correlation.
method Enforces a joint prior with latent space correlation between VAEs trained on each view.
result More strongly correlated latent spaces are uncovered, enabling effective imputation.
q-VAE extracts disentangled latent spaces for robot control and dynamic systems.
problem Disentangled representation learning for latent spaces in robotics.
method Proposes q-VAE based on Tsallis statistics, improving disentanglement and latent dynamics.
result Improves disentangled representation while maintaining data reconstruction accuracy.
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular generative model, but one in which conditional inference can be challenging. If the decomposition into query and evidence variables is fixed, conditional VAEs provide an attractive solution. To support arbitrary queries, one is generally reduced to Markov Chain Monte Carlo …
CCVAE captures label characteristics in VAEs for better representation learning.
problem Capturing rich label characteristics in VAEs without conflating them with label values.
method Developed CCVAE, a novel VAE model that explicitly captures label characteristics in latent space.
result CCVAE allows for effective and general interventions like smooth traversals and diverse conditional generation.
New model generates unseen attribute combinations from limited data.
problem Lack of generalization in deep generative models for unseen attribute combinations.
method Introduces multilinear latent conditioning to capture multiplicative interactions.
result Demonstrates effectiveness on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CelebA datasets.
Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is an open problem in machine learning. The Disentanglement-PyTorch library is developed to facilitate research, implementation, and testing of new variational algorithms. In this modular library, neural architectures, dimensionality of the latent space, and the tra…
Variational Auto-Encoders have often been used for unsupervised pretraining, feature extraction and out-of-distribution and anomaly detection in the medical field. However, VAEs often lack the ability to produce sharp images and learn high-level features. We propose to alleviate these issues by adding a new branch to c…
This work provides statistical guarantees for VAEs using PAC-Bayesian theory.
problem Theoretical properties of VAEs remain open questions.
method PAC-Bayesian theory to derive statistical guarantees.
result Upper bounds on Wasserstein distance between input and generative model.
Two new estimators improve VAE training for hierarchical and prior parameters.
problem Efficient gradient estimation for VAEs with hierarchical and prior parameters.
method Developed two generalizations of Doubly-Reparameterized Gradient Estimators (DReGs) for VAEs.
result Improved training of conditional and hierarchical VAEs on image modeling tasks.
Generative models produce realistic objects in many domains, including text, image, video, and audio synthesis. Most popular models---Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)---usually employ a standard Gaussian distribution as a prior. Previous works show that the richer family of pri…
Paper uses VAEs to detect radar targets in complex noise.
problem Detecting radar targets in compound clutter and thermal noise.
method Proposes a VAE architecture to distinguish radar targets from various noise types.
result The VAE outperforms classical detectors in challenging noise conditions.
This paper characterizes VAE training pathologies and their effects on tasks.
problem Characterizing VAE training pathologies and their impact on downstream tasks.
method Concretely characterizing conditions for VAE training pathologies and their connection to specific downstream tasks.
result Connects VAE training pathologies to specific downstream tasks like learning compressed and disentangled representations, adversarial robustness, and semi-supervised learning.
With the increasingly widespread deployment of generative models, there is a mounting need for a deeper understanding of their behaviors and limitations. In this paper, we expose the limitations of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), which consistently fail to learn marginal distributions in both latent and visible spaces…
A new VAE model identifies and estimates treatment effects with limited overlap.
problem Identifying and estimating treatment effects when subjects with certain features belong to a single treatment group.
method Developed a latent variable model to estimate a prognostic score, which is sufficient for treatment effects. The model is a new type of VAE called β-Intact-VAE.
result The model identifies individualized treatment effects and provides TE error bounds.
Variational autoencoders (VAEs), that are built upon deep neural networks have emerged as popular generative models in computer vision. Most of the work towards improving variational autoencoders has focused mainly on making the approximations to the posterior flexible and accurate, leading to tremendous progress. Howe…
Improved VAE models avoid posterior collapse in text modeling.
problem Posterior collapse in VAEs leads to poor data manifold parameterization.
method Coupled-VAE couples a VAE with a deterministic autoencoder to improve encoder and decoder parameterizations.
result Coupled-VAE consistently improves results in probability estimation and latent space richness.
Conditional domain generation is a good way to interactively control sample generation process of deep generative models. However, once a conditional generative model has been created, it is often expensive to allow it to adapt to new conditional controls, especially the network structure is relatively deep. We propose…
Recently generative models have focused on combining the advantages of variational autoencoders (VAE) and generative adversarial networks (GAN) for good reconstruction and generative abilities. In this work we introduce a novel hybrid architecture, Implicit Discriminator in Variational Autoencoder (IDVAE), that combine…
Molecular optimization aims to discover novel molecules with desirable properties. Two fundamental challenges are: (i) it is not trivial to generate valid molecules in a controllable way due to hard chemical constraints such as the valency conditions, and (ii) it is often costly to evaluate a property of a novel molecu…
Unbiased gradient estimation improves VAE performance.
problem Training VAEs via maximum likelihood is difficult due to intractable integrals.
method Introduced unbiased estimators of the log-likelihood gradient using coupled Markov chains.
result Unbiased estimators lead to better predictive performance in VAEs.
Variational autoencoders (VAE) are a powerful and widely-used class of models to learn complex data distributions in an unsupervised fashion. One important limitation of VAEs is the prior assumption that latent sample representations are independent and identically distributed. However, for many important datasets, suc…
One of the major shortcomings of variational autoencoders is the inability to produce generations from the individual modalities of data originating from mixture distributions. This is primarily due to the use of a simple isotropic Gaussian as the prior for the latent code in the ancestral sampling procedure for the da…
This paper analyzes VAE approximation errors in conditional exponential families.
problem Posterior collapse and approximation errors in VAEs.
method Analysis of ELBO objective and conditional exponential families.
result The ELBO optimizer pulls away from the likelihood optimizer towards a consistent subset of models.
Extends VAEs to handle complex Bayesian network structures.
problem Handling complex dependency structures in Bayesian networks.
method Extends VAEs with graphical residual flows to model arbitrary dependency structures.
result Demonstrates improved performance on synthetic datasets.
Generates consistent IV surfaces using VAEs and SDE models.
problem Creating arbitrage-free IV surfaces from historical data.
method Combining VAEs with SDE models for parameter distribution, sampling, and decoding.
result Superior out-of-sample performance of the refined VAE model.
PH-VAE models heavy-tailed data with flexible Phase-Type distributions.
problem Standard VAEs fail to capture heavy-tailed behavior in real-world data.
method PH-VAE uses Phase-Type distributions defined by continuous-time Markov chains to adaptively model tail behavior.
result PH-VAE significantly outperforms existing heavy-tail-aware VAEs in approximating diverse heavy-tailed distributions.
Deep generative models are attracting great attention as a new promising approach for molecular design. All models reported so far are based on either variational autoencoder (VAE) or generative adversarial network (GAN). Here we propose a new type model based on an adversarially regularized autoencoder (ARAE). It basi…
This research explores a modified VAE model to learn disentangled representations for object recognition.
problem Learning invariant representations for object recognition from diverse appearances.
method Develops a modified Variational Autoencoder (β-VAE) to enforce disentangled representations using variational inference. result Demonstrates that the incompatibility between β-VAE's conditional independence and latent variable independence leads to non-monotonic inference performance. Proposes deep quantile regression for uncertainty estimation in lesion detection.
problem Uncertainty quantification in lesion detection for critical applications.
method Quantile regression for aleatoric uncertainty, Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) with QR-VAE, binary quantile regression (BQR).
result Effective quantification of uncertainty in lesion detection and segmentation.
We define disentanglement in generative models and prove it's related to identifiable factors.
problem Understanding disentanglement in generative models like VAEs and GANs.
method Characterized disentanglement in smooth generative pushforward models using the SVD of the Jacobian.
result Disentanglement is identifiable under certain conditions on the generator, promoting separable factors.
Proposes a VAE variant for ordinal content factors.
problem Isolating ordinal-valued content factors in deep latent variable models.
method Introduces a partially ordered set (poset) structure and a conditional Gaussian spacing prior model.
result Significant improvements in content-style separation over previous non-ordinal approaches.
We combine conditional variational autoencoders (VAE) with adversarial censoring in order to learn invariant representations that are disentangled from nuisance/sensitive variations. In this method, an adversarial network attempts to recover the nuisance variable from the representation, which the VAE is trained to pre…
A new VAE model improves disentanglement with identifiable latent factors.
problem Learning disentangled representations without inductive biases.
method A novel VAE with a conditional prior over latent variables.
result Superior performance in disentanglement metrics.