Variational & Flow Models
The ELBO, reparameterisation, normalising flows, flow matching and rectified transport.
11concepts
101flashcards
82minutes of reading
- 01 Amortised Inference and the Amortisation Gap Why a VAE's encoder is a shortcut rather than an inference algorithm, how to measure the two distinct ways its posterior falls short of the truth, and what to do when the shortcut is the thing holding your model back.
- 02 The Reparameterisation Trick Why you cannot backpropagate through a sampling operation, how moving the randomness to an input fixes it, and the variance argument that explains why this beats the score-function estimator.