Multivariate Variational Autoencoder

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Yavuz, Mehmet Can
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yavuz, Mehmet Can
author_facet Yavuz, Mehmet Can
contents Learning latent representations that are simultaneously expressive, geometrically well-structured, and reliably calibrated remains a central challenge for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). Standard VAEs typically assume a diagonal Gaussian posterior, which simplifies optimization but rules out correlated uncertainty and often yields entangled or redundant latent dimensions. We introduce the Multivariate Variational Autoencoder (MVAE), a tractable full-covariance extension of the VAE that augments the encoder with sample-specific diagonal scales and a global coupling matrix. This induces a multivariate Gaussian posterior of the form $N(μ_ϕ(x), C \operatorname{diag}(σ_ϕ^2(x)) C^\top)$, enabling correlated latent factors while preserving a closed-form KL divergence and a simple reparameterization path. Beyond likelihood, we propose a multi-criterion evaluation protocol that jointly assesses reconstruction quality (MSE, ELBO), downstream discrimination (linear probes), probabilistic calibration (NLL, Brier, ECE), and unsupervised structure (NMI, ARI). Across Larochelle-style MNIST variants, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10/100, MVAE consistently matches or outperforms diagonal-covariance VAEs of comparable capacity, with particularly notable gains in calibration and clustering metrics at both low and high latent dimensions. Qualitative analyses further show smoother, more semantically coherent latent traversals and sharper reconstructions. All code, dataset splits, and evaluation utilities are released to facilitate reproducible comparison and future extensions of multivariate posterior models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07472
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multivariate Variational Autoencoder
Yavuz, Mehmet Can
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Learning latent representations that are simultaneously expressive, geometrically well-structured, and reliably calibrated remains a central challenge for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). Standard VAEs typically assume a diagonal Gaussian posterior, which simplifies optimization but rules out correlated uncertainty and often yields entangled or redundant latent dimensions. We introduce the Multivariate Variational Autoencoder (MVAE), a tractable full-covariance extension of the VAE that augments the encoder with sample-specific diagonal scales and a global coupling matrix. This induces a multivariate Gaussian posterior of the form $N(μ_ϕ(x), C \operatorname{diag}(σ_ϕ^2(x)) C^\top)$, enabling correlated latent factors while preserving a closed-form KL divergence and a simple reparameterization path. Beyond likelihood, we propose a multi-criterion evaluation protocol that jointly assesses reconstruction quality (MSE, ELBO), downstream discrimination (linear probes), probabilistic calibration (NLL, Brier, ECE), and unsupervised structure (NMI, ARI). Across Larochelle-style MNIST variants, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10/100, MVAE consistently matches or outperforms diagonal-covariance VAEs of comparable capacity, with particularly notable gains in calibration and clustering metrics at both low and high latent dimensions. Qualitative analyses further show smoother, more semantically coherent latent traversals and sharper reconstructions. All code, dataset splits, and evaluation utilities are released to facilitate reproducible comparison and future extensions of multivariate posterior models.
title Multivariate Variational Autoencoder
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07472