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Importance weighted autoencoders

10 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

10 Pith papers citing it
abstract

The variational autoencoder (VAE; Kingma, Welling (2014)) is a recently proposed generative model pairing a top-down generative network with a bottom-up recognition network which approximates posterior inference. It typically makes strong assumptions about posterior inference, for instance that the posterior distribution is approximately factorial, and that its parameters can be approximated with nonlinear regression from the observations. As we show empirically, the VAE objective can lead to overly simplified representations which fail to use the network's entire modeling capacity. We present the importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE), a generative model with the same architecture as the VAE, but which uses a strictly tighter log-likelihood lower bound derived from importance weighting. In the IWAE, the recognition network uses multiple samples to approximate the posterior, giving it increased flexibility to model complex posteriors which do not fit the VAE modeling assumptions. We show empirically that IWAEs learn richer latent space representations than VAEs, leading to improved test log-likelihood on density estimation benchmarks.

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representative citing papers

Density estimation using Real NVP

cs.LG · 2016-05-27 · accept · novelty 8.0

Real NVP uses affine coupling layers to create invertible transformations that support exact density estimation, sampling, and latent inference without approximations.

Self-Supervised Bootstrapping of Action-Predictive Embodied Reasoning

cs.RO · 2026-02-09 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

R&B-EnCoRe uses self-supervised importance-weighted variational inference to distill action-predictive reasoning datasets that improve VLA performance on manipulation, navigation, and driving tasks without external verifiers.

Learning to Theorize the World from Observation

cs.LG · 2026-05-05 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

NEO induces compositional latent programs as world theories from observations and executes them to enable explanation-driven generalization.

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