AR-Flow VAE: A Structured Autoregressive Flow Prior Variational Autoencoder for Unsupervised Blind Source Separation

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wei, Yuan-Hao, Deng, Fu-Hao, Cui, Lin-Yong, Sun, Yan-Jie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866917350881624064
author Wei, Yuan-Hao
Deng, Fu-Hao
Cui, Lin-Yong
Sun, Yan-Jie
author_facet Wei, Yuan-Hao
Deng, Fu-Hao
Cui, Lin-Yong
Sun, Yan-Jie
contents Blind source separation (BSS) seeks to recover latent source signals from observed mixtures. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) offer a natural perspective for this problem: the latent variables can be interpreted as source components, the encoder can be viewed as a demixing mapping from observations to sources, and the decoder can be regarded as a remixing process from inferred sources back to observations. In this work, we propose AR-Flow VAE, a novel VAE-based framework for BSS in which each latent source is endowed with a parameter-adaptive autoregressive flow prior. This prior significantly enhances the flexibility of latent source modeling, enabling the framework to capture complex non-Gaussian behaviors and structured dependencies, such as temporal correlations, that are difficult to represent with conventional priors. In addition, the structured prior design assigns distinct priors to different latent dimensions, thereby encouraging the latent components to separate into different source signals under heterogeneous prior constraints. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture for blind source separation. More importantly, this work provides a foundation for future investigations into the identifiability and interpretability of AR-Flow VAE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14441
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AR-Flow VAE: A Structured Autoregressive Flow Prior Variational Autoencoder for Unsupervised Blind Source Separation
Wei, Yuan-Hao
Deng, Fu-Hao
Cui, Lin-Yong
Sun, Yan-Jie
Machine Learning
Blind source separation (BSS) seeks to recover latent source signals from observed mixtures. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) offer a natural perspective for this problem: the latent variables can be interpreted as source components, the encoder can be viewed as a demixing mapping from observations to sources, and the decoder can be regarded as a remixing process from inferred sources back to observations. In this work, we propose AR-Flow VAE, a novel VAE-based framework for BSS in which each latent source is endowed with a parameter-adaptive autoregressive flow prior. This prior significantly enhances the flexibility of latent source modeling, enabling the framework to capture complex non-Gaussian behaviors and structured dependencies, such as temporal correlations, that are difficult to represent with conventional priors. In addition, the structured prior design assigns distinct priors to different latent dimensions, thereby encouraging the latent components to separate into different source signals under heterogeneous prior constraints. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture for blind source separation. More importantly, this work provides a foundation for future investigations into the identifiability and interpretability of AR-Flow VAE.
title AR-Flow VAE: A Structured Autoregressive Flow Prior Variational Autoencoder for Unsupervised Blind Source Separation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14441