RST: certifying and constructing prescribed information in variational autoencoders

Abstract

Posterior-collapse diagnostics can show that a VAE uses its latent representation, but they do not determine whether a specified information view crosses a representation/readout interface fixed before training. Reconstruction-Student-Teacher (RST) makes this stronger requirement explicit: Reconstruction supplies the VAE objective, the Student is a fixed witness, and the Teacher is a frozen information specification. We derive a teacher-relative certificate showing that a positive margin guarantees transmission of the declared information through the prescribed interface, while every input-independent representation lies at or below the boundary. A centered regular-simplex witness turns this certificate into an explicit construction: a minimum-dimensional closed-form teacher code, its complete affine solution fiber, witness-visible and witness-null routing, a margin-energy path, function-space departure from the centered input-independent point, preservation cylinders, and orthogonal multi-view composition. Experiments on five datasets test boundary crossing, stronger KL pressure, teacher counterfactuals, null routing, escape, preservation, cross-seed reuse, and cross-architecture reuse. On CIFAR-100, auxiliary learned readers remain natively decodable but fail under no-refit transfer, whereas the same fixed RST witness directly reads independently trained ConvVAE and ResVAE encoders. Affine adapters recover transferred auxiliary readers, localizing much of the failure to interface-coordinate mismatch rather than absence of information. These results support prescribed alignment as distinct from ordinary decodability.