Resetting a fixed broken ELBO

Robert I. Cukier

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arXiv · 2312.06828

Resetting a fixed broken ELBO

Robert I. Cukier

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Abstract

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one class of generative probabilistic latent-variable models designed for inference based on known data. They balance reconstruction and regularizer terms. A variational approximation produces an evidence lower bound (ELBO). Multiplying the regularizer term by beta provides a beta-VAE/ELBO, improving disentanglement of the latent space. However, any beta value different than unity violates the laws of conditional probability. To provide a similarly-parameterized VAE, we develop a Renyi (versus Shannon) entropy VAE, and a variational approximation RELBO that introduces a similar parameter. The Renyi VAE has an additional Renyi regularizer-like term with a conditional distribution that is not learned. The term is evaluated essentially analytically using a Singular Value Decomposition method.

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Robert I. Cukier. 2023-12-11. Resetting a fixed broken ELBO. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06828

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