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Auteurs principaux: Alessi, Michele, Ansuini, Alessio, Rodriguez, Alex
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03928
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author Alessi, Michele
Ansuini, Alessio
Rodriguez, Alex
author_facet Alessi, Michele
Ansuini, Alessio
Rodriguez, Alex
contents We introduce Density-Informed VAE (DiVAE), a lightweight, data-driven regularizer that aligns the VAE log-prior probability $\log p_Z(z)$ with a log-density estimated from data. Standard VAEs match latents to a simple prior, overlooking density structure in the data-space. DiVAE encourages the encoder to allocate posterior mass in proportion to data-space density and, when the prior is learnable, nudges the prior toward high-density regions. This is realized by adding a robust, precision-weighted penalty to the ELBO, incurring negligible computational overhead. On synthetic datasets, DiVAE (i) improves distributional alignment of latent log-densities to its ground truth counterpart, (ii) improves prior coverage, and (iii) yields better OOD uncertainty calibration. On MNIST, DiVAE improves alignment of the prior with external estimates of the density, providing better interpretability, and improves OOD detection for learnable priors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_03928
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Density-Informed VAE (DiVAE): Reliable Log-Prior Probability via Density Alignment Regularization
Alessi, Michele
Ansuini, Alessio
Rodriguez, Alex
Machine Learning
We introduce Density-Informed VAE (DiVAE), a lightweight, data-driven regularizer that aligns the VAE log-prior probability $\log p_Z(z)$ with a log-density estimated from data. Standard VAEs match latents to a simple prior, overlooking density structure in the data-space. DiVAE encourages the encoder to allocate posterior mass in proportion to data-space density and, when the prior is learnable, nudges the prior toward high-density regions. This is realized by adding a robust, precision-weighted penalty to the ELBO, incurring negligible computational overhead. On synthetic datasets, DiVAE (i) improves distributional alignment of latent log-densities to its ground truth counterpart, (ii) improves prior coverage, and (iii) yields better OOD uncertainty calibration. On MNIST, DiVAE improves alignment of the prior with external estimates of the density, providing better interpretability, and improves OOD detection for learnable priors.
title Density-Informed VAE (DiVAE): Reliable Log-Prior Probability via Density Alignment Regularization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03928