Information-theoretic Generalization Analysis for VQ-VAEs: A Role of Latent Variables

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Main Authors: Futami, Futoshi, Fujisawa, Masahiro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Futami, Futoshi
Fujisawa, Masahiro
author_facet Futami, Futoshi
Fujisawa, Masahiro
contents Latent variables (LVs) play a crucial role in encoder-decoder models by enabling effective data compression, prediction, and generation. Although their theoretical properties, such as generalization, have been extensively studied in supervised learning, similar analyses for unsupervised models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) remain insufficiently underexplored. In this work, we extend information-theoretic generalization analysis to vector-quantized (VQ) VAEs with discrete latent spaces, introducing a novel data-dependent prior to rigorously analyze the relationship among LVs, generalization, and data generation. We derive a novel generalization error bound of the reconstruction loss of VQ-VAEs, which depends solely on the complexity of LVs and the encoder, independent of the decoder. Additionally, we provide the upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the distributions of the true data and the generated data, explaining how the regularization of the LVs contributes to the data generation performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19470
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information-theoretic Generalization Analysis for VQ-VAEs: A Role of Latent Variables
Futami, Futoshi
Fujisawa, Masahiro
Machine Learning
Latent variables (LVs) play a crucial role in encoder-decoder models by enabling effective data compression, prediction, and generation. Although their theoretical properties, such as generalization, have been extensively studied in supervised learning, similar analyses for unsupervised models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) remain insufficiently underexplored. In this work, we extend information-theoretic generalization analysis to vector-quantized (VQ) VAEs with discrete latent spaces, introducing a novel data-dependent prior to rigorously analyze the relationship among LVs, generalization, and data generation. We derive a novel generalization error bound of the reconstruction loss of VQ-VAEs, which depends solely on the complexity of LVs and the encoder, independent of the decoder. Additionally, we provide the upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance between the distributions of the true data and the generated data, explaining how the regularization of the LVs contributes to the data generation performance.
title Information-theoretic Generalization Analysis for VQ-VAEs: A Role of Latent Variables
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19470